Kinect will remain optional to devs

First party developers for the Xbox 360 have not been told that they must use Kinect in all future titles, the platform holder has insisted.

However, the company does remain hopeful that once the possibilities created by Kinect have become apparent, more devs will choose it as an option for future projects.

Fable III ships this week, and it’s not a Kinect game,” Microsoft Game Studios corporate VP Phil Spencer told Gamasutra.

And that’s not born out of us putting mandates that a game has to be a certain length, a certain color, use a certain control scheme, that ‘A’ must do something, or even dictating implementation of Xbox Live.

What we think we do is we unlock potential, and the creators usually want to take advantage of things like Live. And you’ve seen now that Live shows up in almost every one of games, not because I stop on top and say, ‘You have to.’ But they just see the opportunity that’s there.

I think honestly that’s really what you’re going to see with Kinect. But I don’t want to force it into places it doesn’t belong.”