Peter Molyneux, former head of Lionhead Studios, current head of 22Cans, creator of games such as Black & White, Fable, and the upcoming Godus, recently spoke about the Xbox One’s Kinect in an interview with Edge Magazine, calling the device “a joke.” When Molyneux says that about something, you might want to take note, and here’s why.
Molyneux has a bit of a reputation amongst the gaming community for making lofty claims that he can’t really follow up on. Most notably, he’s done it with just about every game in the Fable series, promoting features that never made it into the final version of any of the games. Molyneux, though, isn’t a dick about it (for lack of a better term). Here he is taking to the Lionhead forums to publicly apologize for any features he may have mentioned not being in the final game.
Realistically, more than anything, I would label Molyneux as optimistic to a fault. I truly believe that he has a passion for games and gets so excited for what he and his team are doing that he ends up sharing details and planned features before he really should. It’s this passionate and optimistic quality that makes it all the more surprising to hear him putting down the Xbox One’s Kinect.
The strange thing is, back in 2009, when the original Kinect was still being called Project Natal, Molyneux unveild a project for the then-in-development technology called Project Milo. Obviously, at one point, like many of us, I think, Molyneux was legitimately excited for this technology and what it could mean for the world of gaming.
Fast forward five years, and the Kinect has been through two iterations, and Project Milo has long since been shelved. Molyneux, it seems, is no longer impressed with the possibilities of the technology any more, going so far as to suggest that Microsoft sell the Xbox One without the peripheral to cut down on the price tag.
I think that if someone so clearly passionate about gaming, someone who clearly wants to talk only about the “might be”s and “could be”s of everything, is recommending that you stop incluidng a certain peripheral with your console, you might want to stop and consider how the peripheral is being recieved by ordinary consumers. My guess is that most people would agree with Molyneux.
