Too Much Information!

Microsoft… seriously what the hell are you doing?! During demonstrations with Kinect project Lead Developer, Alex Kipman, we’re learning that Natal Kinect will use between 10% and 15% or the Xbox 360’s processing power during its operation.

This is important for a number of reasons… Actually, NO IT’S NOT!!

Seriously, we don’t need to know that CPU power is being siphoned off in order to run any peripheral device at all, it’s not important to us. Have Sony released details of the CPU processing which Move uses? No, of course they haven’t because they don’t need to. The whole point of a console system is that the hardware layer is invisible to us as gamers, we simply switch it on, stick in a game disc and have fun.

Bowling for Kinect

As a game developer I may have a need to understand the mechanics of Kinect adoption and usage but that kind of information should sit alongside the API details, specialised and reasonably secret. As a tech-head I make some assumptions based on this kind of information. Assumptions like there’s more power in there to be had (a good thing for future games), like Kinect is actually doing some serious work in tracking our bodies around the room and finally, like they needed to hit a price point and couldn’t put a processor into the Kinect unit itself.

This last one is the most interesting for me I think. It shows that Microsoft are now looking at the pennies and having ‘bought’ their significant piece of the market with the below-cost pricing of the console they’re now looking at both consolidation – the new shiny black box – and making some money on the hardware.

I’m sure that the peripherals we’re all encouraged to buy have reasonable margins on them – Live Camera, controllers, Wireless LAN interface etc – and that these margins are nicely supporting the development of the platform, but hitting that price-point with Kinect while ensuring a margin is in place is now a requirement, so compromises are having to be made in the hardware.

And I just made my point, without the “10-15%” knowledge this conjecture wouldn’t be happening, we wouldn’t be talking about compromise or CPU impact or any of those other things – we’d just be looking at how cool Kinect is and working out how we’re going to clear enough space to use it properly. My systems are in my office so there’s no way I’d be able to use it at all, but one of those new shiny 360’s might look nice in the living room…

But I digress, Microsoft have a habit of lifting their skirts just a little too much. Working with them in a number of different markets, this is not the first time I’ve had ‘the cringe’ when reading or hearing what’s been released but up until now the Xbox side seemed to have been relatively immune from this verbal diarrhoea but the condition seems to be catching. Shame.


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