Rare: Controllers have become convoluted

Khe Kinect development director at Rare believes the industry’s principal control mechanism – the joypad – has grown too complex and complicated for the wider market.

Speaking at the fifth annual Develop Conference in Brighton, Nick Burton said Joypads "have become convoluted, they have raised the bar to entry too high."

As an example of his claim, Burton recounted a time when he was playing a videogame with his daughter.

"So my daughter was asking what all the buttons did, and I told her just two were used. She just couldn’t get her head around the fact that the other buttons were redundant."

Touching on the issue of technophobia, Burton said that people unfamiliar with gaming are frightened by pressing the wrong button – fearing that it will have disastrous consequences.

Speaking in the same spirit as many Nintendo executives, Burton said the solution to this is motion control. Not just because of its intuitiveness, but because there is no wrong way of running on the spot and no incorrect way of swinging a bat.

"It removes the layer of scariness that a controller has," he said. "There are so many opportunities that can arise from that".

Rare is currently in the final stages of developing Kinect Sports for Microsoft, designed in the same style as Wii Sports.

Rare has sold some 100 million games since the studio formed 25 years ago.