Kudo Tsunoda, general manager of Microsoft Game Studios, has told us that Kinect development isn’t cost prohibitive for smaller developers.
“Whether you're building an indie, XBLA game or retail packaged console game, very little of the time, energy and cost that you spend on the title comes down to the controls. There's a direct translation of the user input into an on-screen action that you spend time tuning and crafting, but it's not particularly asset based - you don't need a team of 50 artists building a high fidelity world,” he said in a recent interview.
“With the Kinect platform you get the full body tracking, you're getting all the great voice stuff, the human identification stuff. All this comes as part of the platform. Developers don't have to build it themselves so all they have to worry about is what the user is doing and how that correlates to the game action. So this is a small percentage of your development cost. Kinect is no more cost prohibitive than developing on anything else.”
Tsunoda also said that Kinect marks "the first time” playing games “can teach you things that help you in the rest of your life".
“That's the awesome thing about Dance Central - I never really knew how to dance well, but having played the game, I'm actually an ok dancer now and my wife is thrilled that I went from not even dancing with her at our wedding to going out on weekends to dance. It's the first time that actually spending time with videogames can teach you things that help you in the rest of your life.
“You can see already, in both Dance Central and Your Shape, the real world applications of teaching players things. But even games like Kinect Adventures and Kinect Sports help you to get in shape, as well as improving your physical coordination and overall health. It won't be the basis of every game, but it will certainly feature in many of them.”