MS not forcing Kinect on devs or gamers

Microsoft has reasserted that developers are not being forced to incorporate Kinect functionality into their Xbox 360 games and that Kinect functionality will not be forced on core gamers.

"I don’t think we’re trying to put any input paradigm, enforce that on anyone, unless it’s better,” Xbox CFO Dennis Durkin told IndustryGamers. We’re not trying to force anything.

If people want to do it and they think it enhances the experience, I think consumers will embrace it and they’ll do it, but that’s the bar that they’ll expect. And there will be a bunch of experimentation, some of it will work and some of it won’t. The things that work, people will emulate and they’ll chase and the things that don’t, people will try other experiments.”

"I think one part of Kinect is making sure that Kinect is relevant for whatever audience you have. We certainly have a core audience. We want to make sure that Kinect experiences are great for them. But the key word in that is experiences. And it’s got to be experience driven.

So we’re not dogmatic about, ‘Hey, no controller. It’s go to be 100 per cent no controller’. What you’re seeing is a lot of experimentation across that spectrum of, ‘Hey, here’s a totally controller based experience that’s been a controller based experience for 10 years, so people are very, very ingrained in how they interact in that experience’, to, ‘Here’s the other end of the spectrum, which is a totally Kinect-based experience. You don’t need a controller’.

I think what you’re seeing is a lot of those games which were firmly entrenched in this one category, which were controller only, are now experimenting."