TGS: Major Shooter Studios Helped Sony Settle on DualShock 4's Design

Devs with “top-selling” shooters had a say in the creation of PS4’s controller.

PlayStation 4’s controller – the DualShock 4 – comes packing a bunch of new features. It has a touch pad, it’s replaced the Start and Select button configuration with Share and Options, and it even has a strange light bar on the front of it.
But DualShock 4 also sticks with certain familiar features seen on each PlayStation controller (save the aborted Boomerang Controller, of course). One of those features is the controller’s parallel analog sticks, something many gamers expected Sony would change due to the success Xbox 360’s off-set analog sticks found with fans of the shooter genre.
In a conversation with IGN, Mark Cerny, the man who spearheaded the PlayStation 4 project for Sony, talked about the sheer number of controller types Sony tested during PS4’s development, and how some big studios helped them settle on the final design.

“We made and tested a ridiculously broad style of controllers,” Cerny said, “and we would actually have people play games with them. And the current controller design came out of that. We did indeed conclude that the two joysticks on the same level works perfectly well. That did come out of our testing.”
But Cerny noted that the testing didn’t stop with consumers. “We sent out prototypes to major FPS creators. We looked at the top-selling titles, if they were people we could talk to, we began sending over a stream of controllers. And we would ask them things like concavity or convexity, or trigger pressure, or trigger location, or accuracy, or the like.”
It seems that, contrary to the conventional wisdom that off-set analog sticks are best for shooters, that major – albeit unnamed – shooter devs aren’t only behind DualShock 4’s controller design, but actually helped to craft it in the first place. “It was extremely helpful to have the designers of some of the top FPSes on our controller design project,” Cerny concluded.
What do you think, shooter fans? Do you anticipate that DualShock 4’s controller configuration will be ideal for the FPS genre? Or do you think off-set analog sticks like Xbox 360’s and Xbox One’s will continue to be the preferred configuration for many shooter players?