The world of professional gaming is a behemoth, with games of League of Legends and Starcraft II routinely ponying up ever increasing prize pools and attendance rates in its biggest annual tournaments. Its growth is a testament to the widespread appeal these games and the act of watching them have, and pushes more and more to try their luck in competing. As in any sport, though, any edge is a benefit to be taken advantage of and as a result, professionals are always looking for another.
While it has a small but loyal following now, Cinch Gaming has taken its flagship product — the Cinch Tech intelligent gaming controller — to Kickstarter in hopes of garnering an entire new audience. On the outside, it may look like a standard Xbox One controller, but that’s where the similarities end.
On its back are four buttons in addition to the standard set up front, all fully remappable and savable to custom profiles that can be switched for different games. But Cinch Tech’s main focusing is generating troves of data for a player, tracking everything from stick movement rates, button press rates, combo button presses, and more.
Cinch Tech then translates these inputs into “actions” and generates a score and statistical profile customized for each game title. A Cinch Tech user can compare their profile to other users, including professional esports players, to see what they are doing right and where they can improve. The companion iOS/Android app is used to refer to past statistics, challenge friends, earn achievements, change LED colors, and instantly change Cinch Tech button profiles. $179 gets would-be gaming champions a Cinch Tech controller of their very own, slated to ship July 2016. The Kickstarter campaign is looking for $10,000 by May 7th, 2016.
One of the more interesting aspects of the Cinch Tech controller is its ability to display real-time button input on live streams like Twitch, adding an entirely new, more statistical element to gaming overall. This, along with all its features, shows how forward thinking this company is being when compared to the likes of Controller Surge.
It also is anticipating what is patently obvious about esports: it will undoubtedly become even more statistics-based than it already is, and it will become bigger. One thing Cinch Gaming could do is make the tracking technology available for a keyboard instead as many gamers avoid controllers at all costs.