Microsoft's surprise announcement that the Xbox One would be offered without a Kinect for $399 starting next month caught everyone off guard, but there are potential benefits other than just a cheaper console.
Microsoft Announces $399 Xbox One Without Kinect
In an interview with Polygon, corporate vice president for devices and studios Yusuf Mehdi hinted that Microsoft is looking into harnessing the Xbox One processing power that will be freed up by not requiring the Kinect.
The comments ride off of those made by Ben Kilgore (then corporate vice president of Microsoft's Interactive Entertainment Business and one of the chief architects for the new console) last year, which explained how the Xbox One manages its processing.
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"We have special processors for Kinect that enables a bunch of really cool things like part of what you saw today, when Yusuf was like in Internet Explorer and said 'Go to home' or 'Go to ESPN'," Kilgore said last year. "He also said 'Go to Halo' and when he was in Halo he could have gone somewhere else.
"So the system is always listening, kind of outside of the game, which is really different from the 360 model, once you get into the game, it's really only the game code that is running. So we can extend all that in our system versus it being tied up in the game code."
The special architecture of the Xbox One was allowing the Kinect to always be working, but if the majority of future consumers aren't necessarily using Kinect, Microsoft is probably better off putting the power back into the console elsewhere, and that's what Mehdi hinted at doing.
"We are in discussions with our game publishers about what we might do in this space and we will have more to talk about soon," he said. Keep your eyes open for official word on this, though we may have to wait for E3, where Microsoft will be all too happy to announce positive news.
