Harmonix pleased with Kinect ‘gamble’

Freshly independent games developer Harmonix has applauded its decision to back the once new Xbox 360 peripheral Kinect with its brand new IP Dance Central.

Confirming that the game has to date outperformed fellow Harmonix title and established brand Rock Band 3 at retail, CEO Alex Rigopulos has admitted that backing Kinect was a gamble.

"Dance Central is one of the top-selling titles for the Kinect, and the Kinect is one of the most successful products in the entire video game industry right now," he told Destructoid. "So we’re thrilled with how Dance Central has performed out of the gate.

"It was a gamble. There was a moment where we had to take a big leap of faith as a company to devote ourselves to Kinect, which was an unproven peripheral.

"We had actually been doing R&D on a dance game before we even knew about Kinect. At some point early on, Microsoft showed us the Kinect, and at that moment we realised that it was the perfect technology for this application, and we felt very, very strongly about the potential for dance games.

"Yes it was a leap of faith, and yes we also felt that it was the right technology coming at the right time for the game that we wanted to create. Suffice it to say, we’re really happy that we made that decision."

As a result of its success, the studio currently has more resource working on its dance series than any other project.

"It’s our top-selling product right now, and I would say the largest single development team at the studio is hard at work on Dance Central, without being able to be too much more specific than that," Rigopulos added.

"But, we do continue to have significant resources devoted to Rock Band – both in near term and far term of Rock Band – and we also have significant resources devoted to a number of new IPs and new game concepts in development as well. So there’s actually quite a lot of work underway here on a diverse variety of projects."