It's very popular right now, but it's really hard to tell if it's just a fad. Motion controls had a huge wave of popularity starting with the Wii, but that died off. It will be interesting to see.
is there a consensus to why this is? was it just a fad/phase, or is it just too physically demanding so people literally and figuratively tired of it?
i do like the games where you can use motion controls of the controller to enhance your aiming.
or is it just too physically demanding so
people literally and figuratively tired of it?
Also, existing control methods (gamepads, keyboards, mice) are really good. If you think about it, they are miracles of efficiency and accuracy. Compared to motion controls, you do an order or two of magnitude less work, and in return you get an order or two of magnitude more precision in many cases.
There are some genres that are fun with Wiimotes. Wii Sports is always fun for short bursts at a party. Also arcade light gun style shooting games are just phenomenal. But in general, yeecccch.
The original Wiimote only had an accelerometer, that worked well enough in a game like WiiSports where all your actions are predetermined and you only need to measure how 'hard' the player moved the controller. But that approach doesn't work in games where you have multiple actions at the same time.
MotionPlus added an gyro, that's better, but still not good due to lacking a magnetometer, so you had to constantly recalibrate it every couple of minutes. That gets old fast. It also still had no position sensing, so still a lot of guesswork involved in trying to figure out what the player was actually doing with the controller. The Nintendo Switch is also still stuck at this level.
Meanwhile Playstation Move had full 6DOF tracking all the way back in 2010, no need to ever recalibrate thanks to a tracking camera. Amazing in theory, but in actuality that controller was handicaped by a terrible button/stick layout, as in they didn't have any analog stick on the 6DOF controller and instead had a untracked NavController with only one stick. This rendered the Move controller impractical for most regular games. Worse yet, they never updated it and kept using it on PlaystationVR, only finally replacing it this year with PSVR2. The Move controller handicapped a whole decade of motion gaming.
Would a better controller succeeded? Hard to tell. Gyro-aim is still popular on SteamController, Switch and Playstation and is a big upgrade over stick controls, but not as widely adopted as it should be, due to Microsoft not having any motion sensing in their Xbox controller, thus making it impossible for multiplatform games to depend on it. The laser-pointer input of the Wiimote was also working really well and is essentially what most VR games use for UI navigation, but it requires having a split controller.
Going the obvious path of just taking a regular controller, splitting it in two and adding motion tracking to each half was never done by any of the big companies. Even modern VR controllers don't go that route and end up with a layout that is unsuitable as a drop-in replacement for a regular controller.
https://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~okreylos/ResDev/Wiimote/MainPage...
They added motion plus later, which was better, but also required frequent recalibration.
In addition to Nintendo, MS and Sony took a shot at it. I don’t blame Nintendo, I think people just stopped caring.