The Nintendo Wii quickly paved the way for motion gaming and Microsoft answered with their own peripheral in the Kinect. Full of potential, Microsoft mostly squandered it on the Xbox 360 and has not done a good job at utilizing it well on the Xbox One either, even with such a big push for it at the start that saw it being bundled with every console. Many have felt that Microsoft may just abandon the Kinect all together, but Phil Spencer has come out and dismissed those ideas entirely.
In an interview in this month’s EDGE magazine, Spencer was asked if the Kinect was seemingly being shelved. In response, he brought up how they just recently added Upload Studio 2.0 that has green screen effects setup with the Kinect itself. However, he said they did realize the higher price as a result of it being included was an issue.
“We’ll continue to build functionality to make it a valuable part of the ecosystem. That said, price point’s really important for the console – we saw that over the holidays in the UK and US, where we did well when we dropped the price, which was great. And I want to make sure consumers have choice on how much they value the functionality of Kinect when they buy a console.”
Spencer went on to discuss how future Kinect support will really depend on the developers out there that have an interest in the peripheral, but the Xbox side will continue to increase functionality to give even more ways for it to be used. It sounds like Spencer and the Xbox division still are banking on longterm plans for the Kinect, but we’ll just have to wait and see at this point.
Published: Apr 9, 2015 08:00 am