Albert Penello thinks Sony isn’t making the best moves for the next-gen controller.

The DualSense (which will likely be available in black and will require firmware updates, we mentioned this today…) made Penello write a lot of tweets (it starts here), but we put his words into a single quote.

So the DualShock 4 (which will be shorted to DS4 here and there) won’t be supported by all PlayStation 5 games. „I’m probably going to regret bringing this up – but I’ve been thinking about Sony’s decision to only allow DualShock 4 controllers to work on PlayStation 5 when playing backwards compatibility games. I’ve heard their pitch – we want a new generation to take advantage of new features. Fair enough. Something about this feels off. Technology-wise they work. Other accessories will be supported (fight sticks, PlayStation VR) and that’s awesome. When you look at the actual DualSense features, there is nothing about what they are doing that should prevent the DS4 from working.

The same number of buttons. Same layout. Both have haptics, motion, and touch. The one feature only on the DualSense is the microphone – and any games *needing* the microphone could use a headset on DS4. There is no reason the DS4 would not work for all PlayStation 5 games. Haptics is not the reason. The vast majority of games developed for PlayStation 5 will be considering DS4 because third-party [publishers] will be shipping PlayStation 4 versions of games this holiday. And if any of those games have PC versions they have to consider last-gen haptics (either for Xbox or PS4), too,” Penello says.

Then, someone brought up that there are many changes between generations, and so far, we did not see older controllers work on newer consoles. „They have added a microphone and new rumble motors [in the DualSense]. [There was a] much bigger leap in features between DualShock 3 and DualShock 4. I always felt it was a bad call not to carry controllers over so bad in the past = still bad,” he responded.

Mike Ybarra, Microsoft’s former corporate vice president of gaming, also chimed in: „All this is just noise. The price of the box console and the quality of the exclusive games are the deciding factors to many of the hardcore gamers out there. ‘Where your friends are’ is still a big factor too. Price won’t be known for a while, unfortunately.”

Penello ended his opinion with these comments: „What about upgraded titles? If a PlayStation 4 game running on PlayStation 5 gets an upgrade, does the DS4 stop working? Will customers have to forego title updates for controller compatibility? If they don’t, then the argument breaks. If they do this seems very messy. The crazy thing is – there was a better solution and that would have been to make the DualSense work on the PlayStation 4. Stop selling [the] DualShock 4 and make DualSense your “cross-gen” controller. You’ll get a bunch of new controller sales, you’ll have a built-in base of customers ready when they want to buy PlayStation 4. Or give customers the choice to have degraded haptics and they will upgrade to the DualSense over time. This seems like a $$ play which is Sony’s prerogative. What I hope is that all this leads to a cheaper console. If they are shooting for $499 or higher, this bill is adding up. I bet DualSense is more expensive than DS4, too. I’m betting $69.”

Harsh words.

Source: WCCFTech

Please support our page theGeek.games on Patreon, so we can continue to write you the latest gaming, movie and tech news and reviews as an independent magazine.
Become a Patron!