It may seem a ridiculous amount of money but Microsoft has revealed that they spent more than $100,000,000 creating the new Xbox One controller.
“I don’t want to go into specifics,” said Microsoft senior industrial designer, Quintin Morris, “But it’s over $100 million for sure. Between the tooling of the device, the investments we made in process technology, and the engineering work that went into it, we invested a lot to get this thing right.”
You have to wonder how much it cost to create the Xbox One and how they ever will return a profit on the console. Just for comparison, $100 million will get you an original van Gogh masterpiece, or you could buy an Airbus A320neo or support the entire population for the Republic of Palau for one year.
According to VentureBeat, Microsoft spent millions just getting the face buttons to pop a very specific fashion. The new Guide button is now flat with a thin layer of metal covering bulb underneath, this creates a soft white illumination everywhere but the “X” part of the Xbox logo. Microsoft say this also took “many” months to perfect.
“On the console itself, the lit Xbox logo is easier because you have unlimited power,” said Morris. “On this controller, you don’t. You’re running off a battery. You have to be very careful with how you light the LEDs, how much current they consume, and how to make sure that it’s still uniform. Again, the investment required is tremendous. The Guide button is a work of art.”
It was also revealed Microsoft created hundreds of prototype pads include models with a screen, a touchpad, a projector and one device that could emit scents.
“We built small slugs of different types of smells that could actually come out of a controller,” said Zulfi Alam, Xbox’s general manager. “Like, as you walked through a jungle, you’d smell the flora.”
Source: VentureBeat
3shirts
It’s not even all the different from the 360 one which was, to be fair, perfectly good.
$100m would be a lot to make one from scratch but to make minor changes to an already pretty good one? Ridiculous.
Stefan L
There are some nice innovations in there, actually, with the rumble triggers a particularly inventive idea, and one which will have taken a lot of iteration to get to.
The real thing is that things cost a lot of money to develop, and go through countless prototypes and testing phases. The only problem is that so many of the ideas and things they bandied about and tried to work into it got dropped by the way side for something quite traditional. That’s where a lot of the money will have gone.
Scythegpd
For that amount of money you’de that thought they could have included rechargeable batteries …
Scythegpd
For that amount of money you’de have thought they could have included rechargeable batteries …
Germanos
$1,000,000,000 ?! and this is the result o0!? They could give me the money and I would simply give them the x360 controller: “make this one but in black”.
Starman
The only major improvement looks to be the d-pad (which needed changing) guide button was fine as it was. They said there’s 37 improvements over the 360 controller, though I’ve not seen them listed on any articles yet.
beeje13
I don’t know, the idea of micro-vibrators in the triggers might actually be good for gameplay feedback, especially in racers (Forza 5 will show this feature off I think?)
I personally believe the effort on the guide button was wasted and could have been spent doing other things, but it’s clever engineering sti.
Youles
LOL, I thought it was the same. Think of all the timed exclusives they could have paid for with that :p
beeje13
Well they paid $400 million for exlcusive NFL integration with the Xbox One. At least these controller improvement s will benefit more than the US gamers.
double-o-dave
What?! Surely for that kind of money you could get someone to build you your own Terminator T-X unit.
shields_t
What the? Why?
I just don’t understand why people would want to hear that they blew all that money on something so similar to the last generation controller.
I’d dread to think how much they spent on developing the new Kinnect.
Bilbo_bobbins
surely a joke? Do they mean they spent this on backhanders to the media? The controller hardly changed so I don’t believe this, if true, what a colossal waste of money.
boeboe
Don’t make me laugh Microsoft!