Microsoft: Kinect wonâ??t hike game dev costs

The general manager of Microsoft Game Studios insists that developing games for the firm’s new motion controller will not come at additional expense.

Kudo Tsunoda told Edge that developing titles for Kinect “is no more cost prohibitive than developing on anything else”.

He said: “Whether you’re building an indie, XBLA game or retail packaged console game, very little of the time, energy and cost that you spend on the title comes down to the controls”.

Tsunoda, who joined Microsoft January 2008, said that Kinect gives developers full body tracking out of the box, along with sundry features such as voice detection.

“Developers don’t have to build it themselves,” he added. “All they have to worry about is what the user is doing and how that correlates to the game action. So this is a small percentage of your development cost”.

Tsunoda’s outlook is of a similar vein to that of Nick Burton, the Kinect development director at Rare.

Burton recently said during a Develop Conference speaker session that the pricey motion technology can make certain tasks for developers a breeze.

He said that pinpointing a person in a room, targeting their voice, and recreating that on screen is a "trivial" task with Kinect.

"It’s an afternoon’s worth of code," he said, "and that’s the magic of [Kinect’s] skeletal tracking."

Microsoft’s overall intention with Kinect remains a matter for debate. The company, rooted in a core gamer market, has made big decisions to tailor to the casual. Yet hints of a core-based future, such as the one made today by Burton, continue to emerge.