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Kombo’s Sascha Lichtenstein had an opportunity to chat on the phone with Jeff Rivait, Product Manager for Xbox Games & Accessories at Microsoft Canada to discuss Kinect, Halo: Reach and Fable 3.
While discussing Kinect, Rivait flat-out said that Kinect is meant to be a casual game accessory for the time being.
Kombo: Reaction seem to be mixed, but some of the games thus far seem to skew a little simple in terms of concept. Are these the type of games that Kinect is specifically being designed for — a more casual, pick-up-and-play experience — or can more hardcore gamers expect to see more ambitious games in the future.
Rivait: Ultimately the goal with Kinect is that there are already 2 million Xbox gamers in Canada and we want to get the other 30 million Canadians involved in gaming for the first time. For them their barrier is the physical controller and so with that objective of trying to get as many people into gaming for their first time ever we need to have these really accessible games that, you know, appeal to everyone. And although there isn’t a hardcore per se title on Kinect right, you have people like LucasArts working on a Star Wars game, things like Kinect Sports, sports are pretty universal, they appeal to everyone. These are just kind of the starting points for games, so as we start to develop the technology we’ll start to look at more core experiences.
So core experiences could be in the pipeline, but for now, what you see with Kinect is what you’re going to get. This is a device that Microsoft seems to recognize is a casual game device. It isn’t going to be implemented into core games in the near future, and Microsoft’s focus with it is capturing the other audience.
Given the numbers presented by Rivait, between 7 and 8% of the population in Canada own an Xbox 360 and it can be assumed that the majority of that audience are gamers much like ourselves — people who have played games a long time and love varying genres from shooters to RPGs to sports games. They’re trying to capture the people who have made Wii a huge hit. It isn’t for us. It’s for the other people, and maybe someday they’ll implement it into our games — but only when it makes sense to do so.
