Read it and weep! Game development is expensive, and getting even more expensive. The teams needed to make games have become enormous. With Xbox 360 and PS3 titles developers are in full-swing. The teams are growing every year which only contributes to the soaring costs. Pure software innovation is leading to diminishing returns. The days of 2 guys sitting in a garage developing games that can be sold at retail are long gone.

The question is if you're a game developer that doesn't have a huge license for a multi-platform title, how can you compete? How can you avoid art-intensive long-lead time development and still deliver a unique product to retail? One route you can take is to make budget titles. The development cycle is quick, you can make them with smaller teams and the costs are lower. However, with a flood of budget titles, how will yours be recognized as a good game once you get on shelves? We believe one place where true innovation can happen is to re-approach the user interface through the controller.

When people go to the arcades, they are impressed not only with the quality of the games but with all the cool controllers. Players can use realistic machine guns, put out fires with a realistic fire hose, kick an actual soccer ball and they can wear boxing gloves to fight in a virtual heavyweight bout. With all the innovations we have made in graphics, sound and gameplay on the console side, we still are not competing with the current arcade experience. The big missing piece of the puzzle is the controller.

One strategy to re-approach the user interface is to deliver titles which use a custom "game-specific" controller. Right now, Guitar Hero is the best example of this. How many GDC parties had Guitar Hero setup for people to play? Beatmania, another rhythm based game, also was recently released and came with a specialized 'DJ' controller. Done correctly, a game that uses a custom peripheral can give the consumer a high value product for only a few dollars more than a standalone software title.

A similar strategy is to create games that use unique but more generic controllers. A device that works with more than just one title has cost benefits for both the user and the publisher. The return on a user's investment is multiplied when they can use new games with the same device, meanwhile development costs go down as teams can recycle code. Examples are light gun games, microphones, Eye Toy titles and Gametrak games. These controllers allow developers to create unique games, but without the up-front cost of hardware development.

We released a game a couple of months ago entitled Real World Golf that used a piece of hardware named Gametrak. This game is a smaller title, definitely not a large-scale multi-million dollar development. But we created the game to utilize a unique controller that could also be used on future titles. By combining the hardware and software, we allowed gamers (and golfers!) to use their real-world golf swing to interact with the game. This ultimately gave the player a completely new and engaging interactive experience. This innovative title has led to a lot of non-traditional PR and Marketing opportunities for us. Through our relationships with a great PR agency and a creative marketing agency, we appealed to the Golf and sports audience allowing us to get our game seen in places that a normal title would never get exposure.