Gamers want tactile feedback. According to a report at ars technica, a survey commissioned by Immersion, the company that holds a patent on rumble features in console game controllers, says 72 percent of gamers feel that the rumble technology enhances gameplay. Further more 74 percent of respondents did not know the PS3 controllers will be without this feature.

I for one did not know the PS3 controller will not be able to rumble or vibrate. WTF?!? Immersion did end up suing Sony for patent violations around the Dual Shock controllers. Is this a bit of arrogant tit for tat on Sony's part? Or are they really that clueless to leave out such a crucial piece of functionality in a Next-Gen $600 console system?

Given how everything I've seen/heard about how the PS3 is being handled, I'd have to go with "clueless" myself. Talking about never missing something until it's gone....

I'll probably pick up a PS3 later, but I'll wait about a year once the hype has died down.

Wii is my first choice for a new system.

It's still the games themselves that I buy a system for, and the rumble/FF is just an extra to me. A nice extra in a few cases (MGS, driving games, etc...), but I'll easily survive.

I love the vibration/rumble feature on the ps2. But it is not always useful or even recommended. While it is fun feeling the dualshock controller vibrate on some action games which have 10-15 hours of gameplay, there are games which have the vibration feature usually turned off. Those include, but are not limited to, fighting games, longer rpgs and so on. Come to think of it, once I played a game which vibrated non-stop for one hour and later my hands definitely felt weird.

All in all, rumble is a nice feature but not all games benefit from it. I can't imagine myself playing a fighter game with it turned on. And I most definitely don't imagine myself playing Final Fantasy with vibration turned on for hours and hours. No wonder ff is another of those games which have vibration turned off by default for a reason.

In addition to that, Sony allegedly says that the vibration feature conflicts with the motion sensor of the new controller. I can't say I'm happy that the ps3 controller will lack vibration but it is not at all something to die for.

My sentiments exactly Yavor. Nicely said.

If a game uses it in a unique and/or interesting way that enhances gameplay, I'm all for it. Unfortunately, many games seem to add vibration for almost no reason. It's nice when it works, but overall not vital.

I, for one, will not miss the rumble function. I think it's absolutely ridiculous when your controller starts vibrating in your hand when a bomb goes off on the screen. Like that little rumble in my hand would somehow make it feel like the blast on screen was more realistic?! Not. Working. I would much rather have the tilt sensitive function. That might actually be useful in some games.

I still remember with fondness when I was using a Sega Dreamcast and a 3rd party vibration pack. The game was Skies of Arcadia and we quickly noticed something. Explosions on the screen featuring air battles and devestating special moves would cause the controller to vibrate mildly... the way you'd expect a rumble to do. However having the player do something relatively simple, like open a door in the game... well that would set the thing off like it was some kind of wild creature that realized that it needed to bolt for it's freedom. The crazy thing spasmed the controller all over the place in the player's hand (or off the table if I happened to put it down).

It could have been either the fault of the game itself or the 3rd party gear we had. But boy... it sure was entertaining.