While most of the talk these days has to do with the Wii-Move-Kinect motion control melee, there are a few third party developers out there who are still doing their own thing. Softkinetic makes motion control development software and a few fitness games that compete with Wii Fit and so on. They’re getting a bit of a bump as a series B fundraising round ends, netting them $10 million to keep themselves in coffee and desk chairs.
To be perfectly honest, I don’t see their actual games competing on the same level as the in-house titles shipping with the other guys, but we’ve seen them at E3 at they at least work. The optimizations and support provided for the first-party motion tools are perhaps just too much of an obstacle for third-party stuff to really make a dent.
But Softkinetic also makes iisu, a motion and gesture control development environment that I think is likely to sell quite a bit over the next couple years. After all, even games with traditional controls are going to have to implement some basic motion controls if they want to make headlines or build up their back-of-box bullet points.
I guess the take-away here is that the whole motion control infrastructure is growing, not just sales of this or that console. I think we can reasonably expect seriously improved mo-con (I’m making up that term so I don’t have to keep saying the other) games to appear as the infrastructure matures.