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Adinnieken on 07 July 2013
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SvennoJ said:

I do not disagree with you that Kinect use won't be easy to implement down the line.
I am of the opinion that 3rd party developers won't put much effort into balancing or optimizing the game for multiple, and in this case, very different input methods. If they can't even be bothered to get dual analog and mouse+kb to both work optimally, what is the chance that they go out of their way for Kinect 2.

For example take a new IP like Dishonered coming out on pc,xb1,ps3,wiiU. Let's say they expect 30% of sales on xb1 and half of that userbase excited for the Kinect features. How much extra effort will they put into adjusting the gameplay for 15% of players. Gameplay and input method both depend on eachother, the more input methods the less specific things you can do.

Exclusives might put more effort into balancing, but I would still expect their to be 1 preferred input method with which the game works best. So having Kinect in every box won't change much.

My guess is since the Xbox 360 controller is available for the PC, they might be trying to push gamers to it.  The more they can move PC gamers away from the Keyboard and Mouse, the quicker we can have integrated gameplay between PC and console.

That said, I don't think developers are going to include Kinect functionality where it doesn't make sense or where it couldn't benefit the game.  Yes, I do believe they will implement it in instances where they may not be able to include the same functionality on another platform, but they won't be adding Kinect functionality just for the sake or hell of it.

As much as we like to profess that development studios do things for the economy of scale, they do actually do their own R&D and explore new methods and technologies.   Small studios, perhaps not, but your larger developers will definately be working on R&D to see how the technology works and how they can implement it.  Just like the  cloud features. 

If there's an advantage to any platform they'll look into it and explore it, if it makes sense for what they want to do, they'll use it.  You'll likely hear about a lot of companies taking advantage of Microsoft's Cloud offering, there's a good reason behind it, because they'll likely be hosting the PS4 game on those cloud servers as well as the PC, and Xbox One games.  The reason is Microsoft has priced their servers at such a competative rate that it won't make sense to use other hosts.

I think by including Kinect more developers will be utilizing it.  They may not be completely changing the game to focus on Kinect and making it substantially different from another platform version, but I do believe they'll use some feature of Kinect because they know it's there.  I believe some of that will even spill over to the PS4, because it wouldn't make much sense to build something like facial recognition or voice commands into a game and not have those features available on the PS4 version as well. 

I know people think that's crazy, but again, studios are taking the time right now to explore the hardware and see what they can do with it.  They are investing in that research and development now, so it hopefully can pay off later.  So, yeah.  Not going to persude me to think differently at the moment.

If Microsoft was bundling Kinect 2 with the Xbox One later in the lifespan of the console, then I might agree with you.  But with Kinect in every box, and available for developers to utilize, I think you'll see developers taking advantage of it.  Even if it is a basic function.