SvennoJ said:
That is completely taken out of context.
The interview states it wasn't Microsoft forcing Rare to become a casual studio making Kinect games.
Microsoft is commonly blamed for Rare's transformation into a so-called "casual" studio, but Price feels this is a step too far. "Phil Spencer taking the mantle of Xbox is one of the best things that could have happened for Rare," he comments. "Because he's always said to people at Rare [as general manager of Microsoft Studios], 'Do what you want to do and we'll back you,' and he's always stayed true to his word in that regard. It was people in Rare's management at the time who said: 'Well, Kinect is a great opportunity for the studio - go all in on it.' So when executives at Microsoft see that the management team are passionate about doing that, they back them. Microsoft to their credit did that, and perhaps the story online isn't quite reflective of the truth.
"Every company makes mistakes, and people forgive certain companies more than others. We all love Nintendo so much we can forgive them for whatever they do. We'll always forgive them, the day the next Zelda comes around. Everybody likes to create this narrative that Microsoft are evil, but that's not the case - they were very supportive. I guess there were a few people who have since left who thought: 'I wanted to be working on this game or my pet project, and I didn't get to.' And they've kind of painted a picture that it's all Microsoft's fault."
Nothing there says it was Rare asking for Kinect or telling MS to make Kinect mandatory. That was all MS.
Kinect 2.0's undoing would ultimately prove, however, to be Microsoft's vision for entertainment consumption across the board, rather than any particular issue with recognition. The device had become central to Microsoft's efforts to transform Xbox into an all-singing, all-dancing delivery vector for every kind of media, backed by a futuristic UI, with video games merely part of the package.
What kind of journalism is this.
Microsoft has moved on from Kinect and is pushing HoloLens, the augmented reality headset, as its next big thing in gaming.
It's not even meant for gaming. Gaming was used to get attention to HoloLens with a couple of misleading video. Even if it was meant for gaming, they would be making the exact same mistakes as with Kinect, overpromising. Which is what that Rise and Fall of Kinect article is all about.
Many of the activities ultimately supported by 2014's Kinect Sports Rivals were designed to show off the new sensor's capabilities. Jet-skiing was an advertisement for being able to play while seated; rock-climbing was added to show that Kinect could distinguish between open and closed hands. The new sensor was a formidable overhaul, with a wider field of view to offset the removal of the original's tilt motor, but there were still gaps between the rhetoric and the reality. Rare had intended to track trigger finger movements with target shooting in Rivals, for example - in practice, the precision wasn't quite there. "With the second one it maybe got to the level of promise of the first one, technically," says Sutherland. "But by then we were promising more."
If anything, MS sabotaged it themselves at an early stage by removing the processor from Kinect.
One of Microsoft's more significant decisions was to drop a built-in processor that would have handled skeletal mapping, obliging Kinect to draw on Xbox 360's CPU instead. This lowered the cost of production, but also ate into performance, torpedoing more aspirational motion-controlled projects such as Capcom and From Software's Steel Battalion: Heavy Armor years in advance.
Blame it on Rare LOL.
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