At the recent Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Microsoft’s Robbie Bach stated in an interview with CBC that a vast majority of the major publishers around the world are currently working on projects that incorporate the motion-sensing capabilities of Project Natal.
In the interview Bach, who is the President of Entertainment & Devices Division at Microsoft, stated that “something like 70% or 80% of the publishers in the world already doing Natal-based games.” Furthermore, in explaining why they chose to reveal Project Natal at 2009’s E3, he stated that “we wanted third-party publishers to know that it was real and we wanted them to have developer kits and to get them working on it.”
He continued to explain that “our first party studios are [also] very focused on this. We want to have a few titles from Microsoft that show the way and then we want the breadth and power of the ecosystem from our partners to bring lots of new ideas, new innovations, new concepts to the marketplace. Xbox games don’t go away; you have to think of all this as additive. I think it adds to the beauty of what’s going on.”
At the Consumer Electronics Show, Microsoft also announced that Project Natal would be made available in time for the 2010 holiday season.
I wonder how much money MS had to throw at the Devs to even work on this thing. Now if Nintendo would only do this, then we could get some more amazing 3rd party games for the system.
I have a fear that Natal will amount to pretty much just minigames. And people are talking about the amount of shovelware on the Wii, imagine how much of a possibility this could open up for MS and Sony with their motion control system.
Well I’m still looking forward to the Sony motion controller. I saw a prototype of that back in 2003 when it was in planning for the PS2.
I’m just curious as to what functionality this will actually have. I think a major advantage of Natal is that it is completely extra to regular controls. In theory, you could continue holding the controller with both hands while it tracks you… though that would hardly add alot of functionality.