Microsoft’s planning and marketing director Albert Penello believes the public’s perception of Kinect will change once they get their hands on the Xbox One.
Speaking with OXM, Penello said one of the ways in which perceptions will change is that Kinect for Xbox One was built not as an accessory like the first iteration, but was engineered alongside the new console.
“One of the biggest challenges with Kinect is that the people who are the most vocal against it, often haven’t used it,” Penello said. “You know, we’ve sold 26 million of them against a 76 million unit install base, or something along those lines – but the problem is it’s an accessory right? And whenever you have an accessory, you know, as a guy who’s worked on platforms now for three generations, there’s always a pro and a con to an accessory.
“The con is, when developers can’t rely on it, when they don’t know it’s there, they’re never going to take full advantage of it. So, you get these inconsistent gaming experiences, you get inconsistent implementation, game developers had to choose to take CPU power away from the console to support the skeletons. And what we said was, for those of us that use it – like I don’t play Pixar Rush, it’s not my kind of game, but I use Kinect all the time for Xbox pause, Xbox play.
“And when you see the features that the new Kinect can do – we just said, you know what, like let’s take that decision of having to make that trade off away and the console will support it, it’s native, it was engineered for it.”
Penello went on to say that he believes the new experiences created for Kinect “will sell” especially now that “everybody can rely on it, now that we’re not burdening developers [with the task of making] trade-offs with games that use it, that means more people are going to experience it.”
The Xbox One will launch in November.
