PlayStation is speed running losing business for PS6.

You want disc? Fuck you, now your buttons are gone.

i don’t really like the idea of digital buttons because if anything happens to the software they stop working (which is why i’d love if mobile phones brought back physical nav buttons)

Oh you wanted more than the two buttons the software provides? We at Sony have found that our customers prefer to have to purchase more software buttons as needed rather than accidentally clicking an unneeded button during an epic boss battle and lose!

Miss me with that shit. If I wanted virtual buttons I’d play on my phone.

“In order to keep up with changing player demands, we at PlayStation are announcing that controller buttons will no longer be available physically.”

“From now on, each game will come with its own separate subscription service, where you can subscribe to the buttons for the controller device in digital form only. The game publishers will also sell skins for the buttons at additional cost, also only in digital form.”

“Play has no limits.”

NO GODDAMMIT

Sony really want to go out of business don’t they.

Do remember that the vast majority of these kinds of patents never end up getting used, I doubt this one will be.

We learned this lesson from the early days of mobile gaming. Many games tried to emulate on-screen controllers, and it was pretty awful. Developers realized it was awful and shifted towards designing control schemes from the ground up with touchscreens in mind.

Though now that I say this, I suppose it’s entirely possible that a controller like this could be used not to emulate or replace a DualShock, but as a peripheral that new kinds of games can be designed around. That feels even more unlikely though, I miss the glory days of games built around goofy peripherals (Boktai my beloved), but those days are so far behind us that I don’t see them ever coming back.

My kid is still young and is growing up with a lot of their gaming done on a tablet. They’re remarkably adept with touchscreen controls, but it just seems so limiting to me.

I eventually connected a Bluetooth controller to their tablet and suddenly they’re amazed by how much easier gameplay is!

I can conceive of a controller with a surface like those pin art toys

with a membrane stretched over it so that you could reprogram the location and shape of the buttons at will and still have a tactile experience…

…but it would be needlessly complicated, expensive, almost certainly less functional than actual buttons, and more prone to failure. So, not really a meaningful or desirable improvement.

This sounds like a terrible idea.

Why do companies these days not understand the value of tactility?

For anyone unfamiliar with patents - companies like Sony file a shitload of patents every year that they never end up using. Until more info comes out, the patent itself means little.

For context, Microsoft has a total of 124462 patents globally, not all of which have been granted. These days it files about 3000 new patents every year. A lot of them are very vague, some don’t make any sense at all, and many are never put to any use.

Apparently Sony has even more patents than Microsoft, currently sitting at nearly quarter million. However, only a third of them have been granted so far.