I love fighting games, but I am by no means competitive. I am, however, a gear person. I have three different leverless controllers, two of which I made, and am currently restoring an arcade cabinet. As a result I know a severe amount about fight stick hardware: Sanwa buttons, Brook boards, and how to wire a stick. And so I desperately need to know if Sony’s fight stick, code-named “Project Defiant,” is any good or not.
Though I have been critical of Sony’s hardware in the past, I always know its intended market. If you have a Steam Deck already, you do not really need a Portal. The DualSense Edge, while fine, I found to be overpriced, and I opted to just take mine apart and do aftermarket mods. Both of these products make sense if you just wanna go to Best Buy and buy something instead of dicking around with wires. And in Sony’s defense, they have been absolutely killing it in the headphone space.
Project Defiant was announced alongside MARVEL Tōkon: Fighting Souls, the new Marvel-themed 4v4 tag battle game from Arc System Works. While I would normally be wary of anything Marvel related at this point, the success of Marvel Rivals makes this much more promising, as does Arcsys’ track record with Dragon Ball FighterZ. It’s such a good get on Sony’s part that I like to imagine that someone at Capcom is getting yelled at right now.
MARVEL Tōkon: Fighting Souls | Announce Trailer
Project Defiant seems similar to many of Sony’s hardware outings from the little we know about it. It claims to use the proprietary PlayStation Link format for low wireless latency. The product page says it has toolless swappable gates on the stick, meaning you can have your stick movement as either circular, square or octagonal (hey, that’s pretty good!). It also claims to use mechanical switches, although Sony does not specify what kind. Given that this is a low profile stick, I have theories. There’s also a little touch pad on top, which is expected from any Sony controller. Buttons on the render appear to be that shiny translucent plastic on the DualSense, and just by eyeballing it the button layout appears to be something close to “Sega 2P.” If that’s the direction they’re going in I gotta give them credit, because it’s an interesting layout, better for your pinky, and also just generally a classy choice.
Aesthetically, Project Defiant follows the PlayStation 5 visual language, which I still dislike. Part of this is because I have such an undying love of Sony’s industrial design from the mid 80s all the way to the PS2 era. Sony’s house style used to be something special, clean with straight lines and very utilitarian. Sony devices often implied that you were holding something from the future. Even much of their consumer-facing stuff felt like it was treating you like a professional. This changed radically with PS3, got slightly better during the PS4 era, and then somehow reached its nadir during the current era. Though Project Defiant has the same swooping white accents of the PS5, it looks like they’re doing an OK job of making it more respectable than the console, but it’s hard for me to tell until it’s in my hands.
One red flag: the white plastic. I have white controllers and it never ends well. White plastic controllers inevitably get grimy and yellow, showing wear more aggressively. This goes doubly so for fight sticks, and I can just see a sweat and wear pattern developing where the heel of the right hand lands. I will concede that it’s possible that the stock plastic in that part is just particularly wear and dirt resistant. I could also see a world where, like the PS5, the controller has swappable custom shells for that part. That would be a smart move, as half the fun of fight sticks is tricking them out with something garish.
A sign that Project Defiant is in good hands is that Mark Julio announced on X that he’s involved with it. Markman is someone who knows ball and has consulted on a bunch of sticks in the past. Generally speaking it’s a good sign that they’re bringing in people that know what they’re doing.
Project Defiant comes out in 2026. I have no idea if it actually exists outside of a render at this point. No price point was announced, which will make or break the success of the device. Though I’m often skeptical, there's a lot about this I like: a wireless, mass market, low profile fight stick with a really good button layout sounds incredibly promising. But this is also a community Sony has to try harder with if it wants to be accepted.
People who play fighting games take pride in their sticks. Unlike regular controllers, which are traditionally harder to make from scratch, the culture of hand crafting or customizing fight sticks is tied up with the fighting game community itself. Everyone has preferences. Do you want Sanwas, Seimitsus, Qanbas, or Samducksas? How about a freak switch that uses moddable keyboard switches inside of it (I am currently trying to make some of these from scratch)? What potentially embarrassing art do you want on it? What layout do you want?
There’s an entire world of niche vendors like Arcade Shock, Paradise Arcade Shop, and Focus Attack. There’s people selling smaller parts like SGF! and countless Etsy sellers making boutique works of art. There’s an entire project and community just devoted to open source controller firmware, GP-2040CE. It is a deeply competitive market, one with existing standards that encourage tinkering, tweaking and repairability. These devices are serious investments. And while Sony is a giant company that doesn’t live by that support, it substantially invested in it by jointly acquiring Evo in 2021. This is a community with lofty standards, and it would be an impressive feat indeed to make something worthy of the very tournament they own.
