Just yesterday, Microsoft announced that they would be launching an Xbox One console that will not come with the Kinect bundled. This has knocked the price of the console down by $100 where it is now priced at $399, the same price as its rival, the Sony PlayStation 4. Now apart from the price cut, it seems that the removal of the Kinect from the Xbox One console could lead to interesting developments as well.
For starters, it seems that without the Kinect being bundled with the Xbox One, Microsoft could be exploring the idea of possible processor gains which was previously dedicated to the Kinect device. This is according to Microsoft’s corporate vice president for devices and studios, Yusuf Mehdi, who revealed to the folks at Polygon that this was an area that Microsoft is currently looking into.
According to Mehdi, “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.” In fact it was back in October last year that an Xbox One engineer revealed that the console had about 10% of its graphics processing power reserved for system processes, such as the Kinect, so by taking the Kinect out of the equation, perhaps that 10% could be used towards games.
At the same time, the 10% is also used for other system processes, like Snap mode, meaning that even if the Kinect is out of the picture, perhaps not all of that 10% dedicated processing power could be redirected towards games. However we applaud Microsoft at their efforts to try and hopefully something positive will come out from it.