Lapis the Nevrean

I want someone (which will probably be Me, Eventually) to write a library for Linux applications that gives native games bespoke support for the DualShock 3 and the (original, first, 1 (not One)) Xbox Controller with the analog buttons presented and usable. For the DS3 it's a matter of processing /dev/hidraw, and for Xbox controllers it may require a kernel patch but might be easier to get upstream if support for the DS3 was already done.

The only games I'm aware of that have made excellent use of pressure sensitive controls have been Metal Gear Solid 2 and 3, but there were loads of PlayStation 2 and 3 games that had solid analog button controls, and I'm aware of a handful of iOS games that were new or updated for iOS 9 and 10 that support 3D Touch. (The original Xbox was notorious for extremely bad pressure sensitive controls in the few titles that used them, unfortunately. The DoA beach volleyball minigame was dramatically easier with it turned off...)

I think indie game devs could come up with amazing new uses for pressure sensitive controls, or even just solid traditional uses (f.e. accel, brake, steer on analog buttons in a racing game), if given access to supporting hardware without needing an expensive dev kit or license or subscription fee, just a little library that makes it easy to add a special case and a $20-50 controller anyone can buy to start using the feature.

It certainly isn't helping anyone that companies add and then immediately remove pressure sensitive controls from phones and consoles every couple years. There are perfectly good uses for them, but if I was a big game studio with a profit motive and I looked at historical data and saw that no company ever keeps this feature after randomly trying it for one or two product generations, I wouldn't want to implement support either. And it doesn't help that you need to implement a different control scheme for The Other Platform That Doesn't Have It if you want to ship your game on many platforms...

Related aside: apparently the original injection molds for the DualShock 3 were leaked to cheap clone device manufacturers many years ago. If you buy a supposedly new DS3 for a too good to be true price, even though it looks identical to the real deal, it might actually be ewaste and might not implement the analog buttons. The only way to know for sure is to open it up.