The Kinect has been decoupled from the Xbox One in a new $399 SKU that went on sale last week, but Phil Spencer doesn’t believe that this undermines the importance of the Kinect- in fact, he claims, it underscores and underlines it.
“Kinect is critical to our long term success. It is a differentiator for our platform,” he said.
“We’ve had over a billion voice commands used since we’ve launched, we’ve got games that are using gestures in interesting ways… I think the idea that every game is going to turn into a purple-boxed game that’s a Kinect exclusive game was maybe [laughs] not the future. And I don’t think the future that we really want.
“We’ve got games that I think use Kinect in a natural way or they choose not to. It’s more about supporting the creative and the game to deliver the right experience, rather than trying to exploit a certain part of the platform for kind of a PR purpose.
“On the floor now at E3 we’ve got FRU, which is a Kinect game. Obviously we had Dance Central, Fantasia, you’ve got #IDARB which is another cool little Kinect game. Big or small; again I don’t define games, the important games, as the big games so much. I just don’t think about it that way,” he said.
Kinect certainly is getting more support in the coming months than it has received so far from launch, although again, it is getting nothing that truly underlines it as a must have experience for the Xbox One. Whether in the long run, the Kinect continues to be an important part of Microsoft’s plans for the Xbox One remains to be seen.
[Metro UK]
