Microsoft's director of platform marketing says he knows Kinect "will have fewer games than our competitors," but that's fine. "We don't want shovelware, we don't want ports, we don't want stuff with motion controls tacked onto it."
"That's not a slam to our competitors," Chris Penello told Gamasutra in an interview Friday. "We wanted original games that were really taking advantage of what our technology does."
He goes on to further differentiate Kinect from standard control games:
We continue to say that the controller is the best experience for controller games. When people say, 'Why don't you have Halo?' Well, I don't want Halo on Kinect. I want Halo on a controller. Now would it be interesting to see what kind of game they could make using Kinect? Yeah, I would love to see what those guys could do, or what the Call of Duty guys could do. But I don't want to play Call of Duty 4, I want Call of Duty: Black Ops on the controller. So yeah, I'm really, really happy with the stuff that [publishers] are doing. … The most interesting stuff is going to be what comes out six months to a year from now when people come to grips with the technology and really start taking advantage of it.
But Penello was less direct about the price of the unit. Asked why Microsoft's E3 presentation left out that critical fact, Penello said the showcase was meant to sell the public on Kinect's capabilities, not its price. "We didn't want price to be the primary discussion at the show. Our goal was to prove it to people. … We'll talk about price when the experience is what people want it to be."
Interview: Xbox's Penello On Kinect's Biggest Challenges [Gamasutra]