I’d Buy That For (More Than) A Dollar: Yannick Allaert at Nacon on their new premium controller for PS5

Yannick Allaert, Head of Accessories at Nacon tells Vince Pavey about their new premium controller option for the PlayStation 5, and why competition and being different are good for the controller biz.

The French firm Nacon has been around for 42 years, having started out in 1981 as Bigben Interactive. In recent years, the company has grown in bursts of expansion and acquisition, as companies tend to do, and it has gone through a bit of a rebrand and a shift in audience perception along the way. The group now known as Nacon is currently made up of over 12 subsidiary groups of game developers, game publishing teams and hardware peripheral engineers, that are all hard at work on new products and experiences at any given moment.

Yannick Allaert’s accessories team over at Nacon has been developing a new premium adjustable controller offering called the Revolution 5 Pro, and flew journalists from around all over Europe out to Paris for a hardware launch presentation. This presentation was followed by a chance to take the Revolution 5 Pro for a spin in video games like RoboCop: Rogue City and Capcom’s Street Fighter 6, the latter of which is a good controller stress test, but was admittedly the less exciting option of the two, partly because it’s been out a while, and partly because it doesn’t have RoboCop in it.

Here’s what was said in our interview with Allaert about his team’s work after we got to go hands on.

What are the benefits of having hardware and games under the same brand?

It’s always good, because we get feedback from developers on the gaming side, while we develop peripherals. Our jobs are similar because our purpose is to create a very good experience for the gamer. But our job is also completely different, because we are engineering hardware.

When we show off our controller here in Paris, you can test Robocop. We are very proud of that because RoboCop: Rogue City is a gorgeous game that we are very happy that you can play with our controller, even if you’re on PC. We can show off the quality of our controller with one of our best games. It’s a perfect match in what we want to achieve.

Did you collaborate with your game studios when designing the Revolution 5 Pro controller?

We do have a lot of studios now, and most of the studios request controllers from us, but we prefer to develop with a specific consultant. After that we select some early play testers from our studios, as well as some casual players. We expand bit by bit [and] have feedback from various kinds of gamers.

Pro-gamer Mistah Crimson [Nathan Massol] was working with you?

Yeah, we’ve been working with Mistah Crimson for quite a long time. First it was about all of the engineering and industrial design, but all of what we are doing needs to be guided by the fact Mistah Crimson doesn’t care about all of that. He just cares about playing with it.

When you give the controller to more casual players, are they not overwhelmed by all the options? Do you work with them to make sure that it’s very accessible?

That’s why we have an advanced mode and a standard mode. Our main objective is always the experience of the gamer. If you are a casual person, you can just play and enjoy it. But of course, a casual gamer can become a hardcore gamer, and even a pro gamer. We give them the tools to improve by themselves. When they’re playing, maybe they’ll say ‘Oh, if I have more deadzone here, I can play better.’ … and then can go to the advanced mode and become more than a casual gamer.

Over the last five years or so the market for third-party controllers has increasingly been focused on premium products. Do you see that continuing, given the cost of living crisis going on?

We’ve been working very closely with Sony since 2015, to improve and focus on a premium offer to gamers. We are involved because we think we have value to give. So in that space, we have to do something alternative to the DualSense Edge. At PlayStation, it’s in their DNA to have a symmetrical joystick. Our DNA is asymmetrical joysticks. When you’re different, that’s when you can give alternatives to consumers.

How difficult is it to stand out from competitors like Razer and Victrix?

For me, it’s a good thing to have competitors. They help us get on top, because we need to improve and to find ways to be different in our solutions. That’s led to us using new technology like Hall Effect sticks to avoid joystick drift, and to increase the lifetime of the controller, which is also something we need to think about. We also offer spare parts to our gamer base, if they need repairs.

We have nacon.com so that everybody can talk to us directly. We have a consumer services team in Europe and the US. A very strong one. We are listening. It’s very important for us to understand and to improve all the time.

Do you think that having asymmetrical sticks makes it easier for Xbox players to jump into the PlayStation ecosystem?

That’s a tricky question. No, I don’t think so. Well, yes, and no. The first time we went to Sony and showed them an asymmetrical controller, I said ‘Most core gamers prefer to play with an asymmetrical [controller] like Xbox’ and they told us ‘We know, you’ve got the licence.’ But of course, Sony’s fanbase loves the symmetrical sticks because they’ve been playing for ages on PlayStation consoles. It gives us a very good alternative as some people like playing not only on PlayStation or Xbox or PC, but anywhere. So that’s why we have PC compatibility with our peripherals.

Would you say that the component shortages and delays experienced at the start of this console generation are gone now?

The situation is much easier now than it was one year ago. That doesn’t mean we can’t have a shortage, but we have security to provide enough products to the market right now [and] for the Christmas season. So that’s quite good. We hope. We don’t know – if there is a big success, maybe we will have a shortage – but that’s the sort of shortage we’d want.

What are some of the key areas where you hope to expand and improve in the next couple of years?

Well, we already have a lot of ideas in mind and we are already checking on some different areas in the next coming months. I’m sure you will be very surprised by what we propose.

Will see-through or ‘Atomic Purple’ controllers ever be cool again?

We can’t do that, because if you open our controller, there is no space to do cosmetic things. It’s purely a piece of technology. We need to keep the vibration motors, and need to keep the balance with extra weight added. Everything is full. It’s too packed with power for cosmetics.

We need to investigate what people want. We’re launching with the Triple Black Edition and the Black and White Edition controllers. We predicted we’d need 60% of the white and 40% of the black … but we started our pre-sales recently, and it turns out people want the opposite. So people want to buy 60% in black and 40% in white.

So, no RoboCop chrome model at launch then?

That’s a great idea! We’ll see what we can do.