It would be right to say that Sony toyed with the ideas about the design of the PS4’s controller but on the other hand, a much more conservative approach was taken for the Xbox One by Microsoft when they decided to design the controller. But it seems like the design wasn’t suitable for the dynamism of today’s market and it has been reported that Microsoft was not so willing to tweak about this controller of Xbox because it only considers the hardware which is best in its class. Zulfi Alam, who is the general manager of accessories pressurized a lot for some change and this lead to the investment of $100 million as the Ballmer and Microsoft finally decide to devise a course of action to make some changes to the conservative design.
It could rightly be said that the company wasn’t all too happy about the changes made to its original design but despite of this fact they were able to roll out a few prototypes. And surprisingly all these ended up to be quite different than the usual. Most of these prototypes had some attractive features added to them such as the built-in displays and cameras. Though these versions of prototypes might seem to be very attractive and definitely very different, there were a few which were falling more on the weird side. Such as those which had cartridges for emitting smells or those which featured a built-in projector that could throw out visuals reminiscent of ‘illumiroom’. Unfortunately these prototypes couldn’t make their way to the market since they consumed too much of the battery power and now we have the traditional controller selling in the market.
Source: GamesBeat | News Archive