Market research company Ipsos Insight released the results of a survey conducted on behalf of Immersion Corporation indicating that gamers prefer to have vibration feedback in their gamers. Immersion, of course, is the current holder of a number of patents for vibration function in controllers, and recently won an injunction against Sony for their use of rumble technology. Some have suspected that this may be the reason that Sony’s Playstation 3 controllers will not feature rumble support.

So, the ground-breaking news from this survey is that 72 percent of gamers believe that vibration feedback enhances their game experience “most of the time.” According to their report, 74 percent of gamers were also unaware that Sony had removed rumble support and 58 percent were disappointed. Somewhat shockingly, 5 percent of the gamers polled would not buy a PS3 if rumble was not included. While many people like the rumble feature, it is hard to believe that this would end up being a deal breaker, despite Immersion’s wish that this would be true.

Ipsos also makes some interesting conclusions about the rumble/vibration feature. They claim that gamers are “unaware that this capability must be present in the console to experience vibration feedback with any gamepad controller…” Ipsos doesn’t seem to be aware of the genesis of the vibration feedback function. First, there is no indication that this support has been removed from the Playstation 3. Second, if this kind of support had to be built into the console then rumble could never have been added after the fact to the Nintendo 64 or the original Playstation. Certainly, one would have a hard time adding interactive rumble to a game that previously didn’t support the feature, but vibration feedback falls into the realm of support for software and the peripherals, not the base console itself.

Still, the survey does feature some interesting numbers about next generation console adoption. Separating the numbers from the vibration bias, it does appear that fewer previous generation console owners are going to be adopting the Playstation 3. The survey showed that among those owners, the marketshare numbers shift to 48 percent Playstation 3 owners, 37 percent Xbox 360, and 15 percent Wii. Ipsos doesn’t indicate if the option to purchase one or more consoles was given. Overall, the survey gives some interesting material for discussion, but given the relatively small sample size and the focus on vibration feedback, it is hard to give the survey a lot of weight.