Microsoft’s marketing director Chris Penello has been talking to Gameasutra about the Kinect. Or rather, the games for it:
This industry thrives on being able to take an engine or game and put it on as many platforms as possible. We don’t want shovelware, we don’t want ports, we don’t want stuff with motion controls tacked onto it. That’s not a slam to our competitors. We wanted original games that were really taking advantage of what our technology does.
I know we’re going to have less games for [Kinect] than our competitors, but I think each one of those [games] is doing something interesting, and our system works differently and has different advantages than the wand, quite frankly. We’re basically asking publishers to go out and make exclusive content for this new technology and this new customer. … To me it’s way more important to have a handful of really good game titles that take advantage of the tech than 40 titles of which half of them are controller games with waggle added onto them.
We continue to say that the controller is the best experience for controller games. When people say, ‘Why don’t you have Halo?’ Well, I don’t want Halo on Kinect. I want Halo on a controller. Now would it be interesting to see what kind of game they could make using Kinect? Yeah, I would love to see what those guys could do, or what the Call of Duty guys could do. But I don’t want to play Call of Duty 4, I want Call of Duty: Black Ops on the controller. So yeah, I’m really, really happy with the stuff that [publishers] are doing. The most interesting stuff is going to be what comes out six months to a year from now when people come to grips with the technology and really start taking advantage of it.
However, when questioned about the price for Kinect, his words weren’t quite as forthcoming: “We’ll talk about price when the experience is what people want it to be†he said.
According to Microsoft’s own website the Kinect will cost $149.99, which is the same price it apparently costs to manufacture. Of course, anybody that buys one will have to buy a game to go with it, which is where Microsoft will make their money.
Hopefully for the UK release Microsoft won’t just swap the ‘$’ for a ‘£’ sign.