Nintendo pissed a lotta third-party publishers off with the secrecy surrounding it's Wii MotionPlus technology. Lucasarts especially. But it's not all flaming torches and pitchforks outside Nintendo HQ. Ubisoft still love them! Indeed, they think MotionPlus will add "a lot of pleasure to the experience" of playing more shitty Ubisoft Wii games playing a Wii game. You tell em, Ubisoft. Those Lucasarts kids are just mean.

Building Believable Worlds: Yannis Mallat On Production At Ubisoft [Gamasutra]

When Nintendo announced MotionPlus for the Wii, who knew about it? Nintendo did. And that's it. They didn't tell a soul. Not even their beloved third-party publishing and development partners, who were understandably a little upset. Lucasarts are among those upset, and...oh, did I say upset? I meant to say totally pissed. Here are Lucasarts, supposedly working on the "ultimate lightsaber game" for the Wii, and they're kept in the dark over technology that could have turned a combat game with waggle into an actual ultimate lightsaber game? No wonder they're not happy!

Nintendo Waves Off Third Parties [Game Informer Magazine, via NeoGAF]

The Wii MotionPlus accessory is the next big thing for Nintendo, but it could very well wind up being the next big thing for many companies, both in and out of gaming. Joe Virginia, the boss of MotionPlus accessory maker InvenSense, told Eurogamer that the tech isn't exclusive to Nintendo, and it's generating a large amount of interest.

"Of course we're incredibly pleased - delighted would probably be a better adjective - that Nintendo approached us... but it's not an exclusive relationship", Virginia told us. "I can't get into details about other folks that are interested in this technology, but as you might imagine of course there is more interest out there".

We've heard rumblings about Microsoft and Sony exploring motion control in the past, and those rumblings should only get louder now that the tech is available to make it actually work.

MotionPlus tech not exclusive to Nintendo [Eurogamer]

While the promise of 1:1 Wii Remote control is a tantalising one in theory, so far we've seen it working on...Wii Sports 2. Uh, thanks. With the company that's supposed to bring smiles doing nothing of the sort, it's instead left to the MotionPlus' creator, boring tech company AiLive, to show us a video that, despite being shot in 10 minutes with one of the techs and a shitty handycam, really gets us all excited about the add-ons potential. You'll want to skip to around the 1:50 mark.

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That's what Game Informer are saying, having spoken to a number of developers at E3. They say none of the devs polled had any inkling the product was to be announced, and that the general feelings amongst them were those of "annoyance and betrayal". If that's true across the board (and it seems to be, as it echoes similar sentiments we heard at E3), it's good news for Nintendo's secret-keeping team! But bad news for third-party devs and consumers, because it means anyone who's not Nintendo is only now able to plan for games that make the most of the add-on.

Wii MotionPlus Took Developers By Surprise [Game Informer]