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Kinect's Kudo Tsunoda

On hybrid games, evolving through firmware and staying relevant.

EurogamerSome would say there are still issues with the technology - for example, quite a lot of time elapses between your instinct to make an action and its occurring on a screen. Is that just a case of developers finding the right rhythm with the hardware and not just trying to put the same experiences on it again?
Kudo Tsunoda

If you play the games out there today, they've all got what you're talking about, but the games react really well. In Joy Ride the steering is super-precise and exact. All the moves you're doing in Kinect Sports or Kinect Adventures are all things that work really well. As games get closer to launch, the optimisation stage is the last thing that you go through, whether it's a Kinect game or a controller game, and so you can see as we get closer to launch all the games are getting really fast and responsive.

EurogamerDo you expect Kinect to get better at reading hand motions and small hands?
Kudo Tsunoda

Yes. As the technology evolves over time you're going to get more granular on what we can do. The closer you get to the sensor, you can actually get a pretty good reading on a hand motion. Even with my hands you can get a good read far away.

Out of all the features out of Kinect, the best feature is that it just works, right? So things like little kids hands - we try to make sure all our experiences work for everybody in all cases. But I think over time you'll see not just from a technology perspective but even from how we design for things, we'll get things like hand articulation more involved.

EurogamerYou showed a Star Wars Kinect demo at E3. Does that actually exist or was it just a bit of CG you guys kicked up?
Kudo Tsunoda

No, that's a game that is under development for sure. We're focused on the Kinect launch titles for now, but it's stuff that you'll see more news about as we go more into next year.

EurogamerWhen do you expect we will see Kinect involved in one of Microsoft's pillar franchises like a Halo or a Fable or a Gears of War?
Kudo Tsunoda

I think people can really see the creative potential of Kinect, and I think it's about getting franchises like that not just to take Kinect and cram it into their game in a certain way, but to build something from the ground up for it.

I think just like when you first saw people were trying to port PC shooters to console and didn't do a good job of it, then Halo came along and did an amazing job from the ground up specifically for a console - I think that's all the kind of stuff you're going to see going on with Kinect in the future as well.

EurogamerRecently we've seen EA buy Playfish, Disney by Playdom, Zynga make more money than World of Warcraft. Given the extraordinary volumes of money being made in social games, and the fact that broader audience is already engaged there, that perhaps you guys have backed the wrong horse with Kinect?
Kudo Tsunoda

The things that I always find interesting in those games is that there's always a super-viral nature to them. They do a really good job of showing off other titles - one game within another title - and that's what gets everyone in and playing those.

It's interesting that as you look at what we're doing with the Kinect stuff, where there's the show-off-and-share system in Kinect where there's the picture and videos that are getting captured, and the kind of living statues that you can animate with your body and record with your voice, those are all things that just like more social media games where you can take those things. You can post them online, you can put them on Facebook, you can email them to people, and there's a real viral nature to the things we're doing with Kinect games.

I don't look at it so much as, "here's a threat to console gaming," I just think that it's really interesting, the viral nature of those games, and seeing what we can do to incorporate those kinds of things into our console games.

Kudo Tsunoda is creative director on Kinect for Xbox 360.

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