British games market media site MCV claims it's found official footage of the Xbox 360 'Wii-mote', even though the tabloids broke the news about the two-piece, six-degrees-of-freedom, motion-sensing Motus "Darwin" months ago. For reasons unknown, MCV has elected this morning to label the openly agnostic third-party motion-sensing peripheral we've known about since April "an Xbox 360 motion-sending pad" based on a few demonstration videos of the controller in action with games like Lego Star Wars II and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.
Check out the videos for yourself. I don't think it's possible to discern which system(s) they're demoing on. Could be Wii, Xbox 360, PS3, or even a PC.
The MCV article continues -- bizarrely -- to state that "it is not made clear whether Motus is planning to release the peripheral as a third-party product, or if Microsoft has done a deal with the company to make it an official Xbox accessory."
Not clear? I guess I'm stuck way back at the point where we have a shred of evidence suggesting they were planning an exclusive deal with Microsoft in the first place. Motus has made it pretty clear in past interviews that it views the Darwin as a platform-agnostic peripheral. But even if we speculate that it's all a smokescreen for a first-party announcement at next week's E3, why in the world would we assume they'd do their first-party deal with Microsoft, say, and not Sony?
For the record, here's what we've known about the Motus Darwin since April:
1. The company's been working on a motion-sensing Wii-mote competitive peripheral that doesn't use an external infrared sensor, and which, according to Motus chairman Satayan Mahajan, "works on console as well as PC."
2. According to Mahajan, "If you look at the rumor mill... it looks like Microsoft is coming up with something, and we have something... So motion-based control is needed on the other consoles, as well as PC." Unless he's just playing coy, which is always a possibility, he views the Darwin as at best, a unique third-party offering, and at worst, a competitive player in a market Microsoft's planning to enter on its own at some point independently.
3. Neither Microsoft nor Sony would allow actual video of an unannounced first-party peripheral to run like this. Leak, maybe, but not sit front and center of a company's website. The video you're seeing at Motus's site is classic promotional fodder, designed to pique curiosity as much as anything.
4. Mahajan claims there are publishers in studios using the Darwin right now. Which could mean anything, but which sounds a lot like we're staring at a third party peripheral and not a first party partner to me.
Think about that last point. Does it make sense for Motus to do a first-party deal if it can sell the Darwin across two sets of platforms for multi-console releases like the ones demoed in those videos? Neither the Xbox 360 nor PS3 have all that terribly impressive install bases at this point. Why in the world would Motus want to throw half its potential revenue away by signing on to just one platform? I certainly wouldn't. Not unless Microsoft planned to buy me out for a pile of dinero -- certainly a possibility, but I don't think a very likely one.
The Wii-mote's a pretty elementary device that unexpectedly resonated with consumers. Everyone knew what it did and how well in advance. The surprise wasn't the technology, but the way the technology lit a fire under casual gamers and -- temporarily or permanently -- carved out a new market virtually overnight. Reverse-engineering and building on the technology itself ought to be a snap for Microsoft internally. Matching Nintendo's cultural gravitas, on the other hand, is a different task entirely.
I've argued repeatedly that adding a Wii-mote competitive peripheral to the 360 or PS3 would be relatively simple. Getting developers to make games worthy of such a device, making the 360 or PS3 more price-competitive with the Wii, and convincing a now more than ever price-sensitive public "you can have it all" by spending more is of course exponentially more difficult.
We'll know one way or another whether there's a story here by this time next week. In the meantime, though, don't believe everything you read.
