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Microsoft’s Phil Harrison has insisted that it’s far too early to draw conclusions about how the next-gen battle will pan out.
We’re 120 days into our platform lifecycle. You know better than anyone that this is a marathon, not a sprint. We’re happy with our plan,” the European corporate VP told Venturebeat.
Things are going great. It’s the fastest, most successful launch in our history. Titanfall is blowing the doors off, literally and figuratively. Great engagement, just fantastic proof of users not only buying Xbox One, but using it in a very engaged way. More than five hours average use per day, which is amazing.
You can see independent surveys and studies showing our sell-through doubling in the UK as far as hardware. We have a fantastic line-up we’ll reveal more of at E3 and beyond. We have a lot of great surprises to come.”
Harrison also rallied behind the often-unpopular Kinect, saying that great things are still to come from the latest iteration of the hardware.
The teams have really gotten to grips with the capabilities of the technology,” he insisted. Kinect Sports Rivals, particularly, with the virtual-athlete creator, where you can stand in front of Kinect and it makes a characterization of you. That’s a magical experience. It looks simple, but under the hood it’s incredibly powerful software technology at work.
We have a number of examples where developers are using Kinect in impactful ways to augment their game design, whether it’s voice activation in Capybara’s game, or the game FRU, which is in the back corner. It uses your shadow to create an alternate version of the game world, so that in a platformer, you reveal parts of the game by moving around. It’s very clever.
I hope that games like Spark and Kinect Sports Rivals will act as showcases for the technology and not just for consumers but also for developers.”
