With the Xbox 360, Microsoft had to do everything in it power to convince people of the Kinect’s capabilities. Since it’s an accessory and not something stuffed into each and every box, it was up to the Xbox maker to show the world why the motion camera was an integral part to the future of gaming. It might not be required on the Xbox One, but now every hardware offering will include a Kinect. It’s a different situation, yet planning and marketing director Albert Penello tells OXM that those who’ve been so vocally against the Kinect in the past probably didn’t even give it a try.
"One of the biggest challenges with Kinect is that the people who are the most vocal against it, often haven't used it," Penello said about the current-gen Kinect. "You know, we've sold 26 million of them against a 76 million unit install base, or something along those lines – but the problem is it's an accessory, right? And whenever you have an accessory, you know, as a guy who's worked on platforms now for three generations, there's always a pro and a con to an accessory.
"The con is, when developers can't rely on it, when they don't know it's there, they're never going to take full advantage of it. So, you get these inconsistent gaming experiences, you get inconsistent implementation, game developers had to choose to take CPU power away from the console to support the skeletons. And what we said was, for those of us that use it – like I don't play Pixar Rush, it's not my kind of game, but I use Kinect all the time for Xbox pause, Xbox play.”
This conversation took place not long after the initial reveal of the Xbox One, so much has changed since that time. However, the core philosophy of the Kinect remains the same as long as it’s still included with all next-gen purchases.
“When you see the features that the new Kinect can do – we just said, you know what, like let's take that decision of having to make that trade off away and the console will support it, it's native, it was engineered for it," he concluded.
