Right now, the only people who have access to Microsoftâs Kinect development tools are larger, established studios. Microsoft is trying to expand that group to include indie developers, though the emphasis at this stage is still on âtryingâ.
âWhen [the indie] community will light up, we donât have a date lined up yetâ Microsoftâs Phil Spencer told IGN, who had asked about a timeline for indie development on Kinect. âItâs not that Iâm hiding it from you I just donât know. But getting a broad set of developers supporting our platform at all levels is important to our success. Itâs in our plan to make that happen. Weâre working with some universities now, we did a Kinect course down at USC last spring where we had students in their computer science and film schools build some stuff. It was great to see the stuff they came up with. Weâre going to continue to push there.â
âIâm trying to answer your question specifically about how far away we are. I think weâre closeâŠwhen you can simply drop the things in and go away and it works perfectly, then youâre ready. And I think weâre close given weâre so close to shipping.â
Awfully long answer to a seemingly simple question, but he says âcloseâ enough times at the end there to have people feeling optimistic.
