14 DAY TRIAL // Sega is producing a hardcore game for Kinect, according to the President of Sega West, Mike Hayes. The title will be launched sometime at the end of 2011 or at the beginning of 2012, but Hayes wasn't keen on giving any details about what it was or at least how Kinect fit into the picture.
In an interview with CVG, he argued that seeing Kinect as only a proposal for casual gamers was wrong and that hardcore games would come in time, as studios started getting accustomed to the software developer's kit that came for the motion controller. “The dev kits we've had to work on have been exponentially improving over the period we've had them. The amount you can do out of the blocks is actually made pretty tricky,” Hayes said about this subject.
In Hayes' opinion, hardcore gamers should get their hopes up for the next E3, as “more of the features of Kinect will be in use by developers. I think you'll find more clever and sophisticated applications then. It is a reasonably complicated piece of kit, therefore it's going to take us longer to use all of those aspects in a game.” He also commented that the development teams had the tools for only one year, clearly not enough time to make something for the highly critical hardcore crowd.
Sony is in a much better position, apparently, as the PlayStation Move is similar in a sense to the WiiMote, so the experience of developing for Nintendo's console carries over and shortens the time in which a serious game can be made. Also, the PlayStation Eye has been out for some time now and various studios have had enough time to work with it, according to Hayes. Sega is involved in Kinect 's launch in November with Sonic Free Riders. Sonic is the first big game brand to grace Kinect, as all the other titles that will be available at the launch of Microsoft’s device are new intellectual properties.