14 DAY TRIAL // A Microsoft executive has stated that the current generation of gaming consoles, which includes the Nintendo Wii, the PlayStation 3 and Microsoft's own Xbox 360, will continue to dominate the market for a long time with the creation process for a new device still years away.
Stephen McGill, who is the director of the Xbox 360 platform in the United Kingdom, has told Xbox 360 Achievements that, “Well this generation is here for a long, long time. I think there's still a lot of legs left with the Xbox 360, so we're years away from contemplating what comes next.”
He added, “With Xbox 360 we constantly innovate with the current console you have, through extra services on Xbox Live that we can pump down the service, then obviously with Kinect; that's a massive game-changer for the industry, transforming what entertainment in games can be for friends and family.”
Kinect will be released on November 4 in the United States and later in the same month all over the rest of the world, for the price of 149.99 dollars.
Microsoft says that it is treating launching Kinect like the introduction of a new home gaming console and expects the device to lengthen the life of the Xbox 360 by about five years, the length of the usual console cycle.
Observers of the video game industry have commented that both Microsoft and Sony have spend a lot of money and quite a bit of time to create the current generation of consoles and would like to go for as long as possible before committing to another project of the same complexity.
Both Kinect and the PlayStation Move are supposed to mimic and expand the functionality of the Nintendo Wii and attract another segment of the market to the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3.
Rumors have also been swirling that Nintendo is working on a more powerful version of its own home console.