Kinect as core as Xbox Live

Microsoft hopes that the Kinect motion camera will one day be as integral part of the average Xbox 360 owner’s user experience as Xbox Live has become today.

Indeed, speaking to GameSpot the corporate VP of Microsoft Game Studious Phil Spencer has claimed that in time there will no longer be a distinction between Kinect and non-Kinect games.

We view Kinect as a fundamental part of the platform,” he stated. It is as core to the platform as Xbox Live is.

And just like there’s an internet pipe connected to the dev kits, there’s a camera connected to the dev kits. So you think about those dev kits and those teams and that creative space, and how they want to add Kinect to that experience.

I think over time for first party, you’re not going to see that differentiation between ‘is that a Kinect game?’ and ‘is that not a Kinect game?’. You’re just going to think about these things as 360 games. Now that doesn’t mean there’s no controller included. This is just like Live, since Live is used in many different ways across many different experiences that we build.”
Spencer went on to state the importance of third parties to its hardware.

We are launching with 17 games, which is right up there with the Xbox 360 launch. Now one thing we, as a first party, don’t want to do is dominate our platform. There’s a real healthy third-party ecosystem on our platform; that’s really important. We want to foster that.

We get our games out to third parties early; we show them what we’re doing in first party to help build interest and excitement. The level of support we’re seeing from third party is growing.

I think our Kinect launch lineup is strong. It’s deep. I think it’s great seeing the third parties step up. But our gamer customers should expect to see Kinect across all genres. All genres will support Kinect at some point.”