Sony: Why we turned down Kinect

When they added the Wii MotionPlus was when the gyros came way down in price. That's when we added the gyros to the Move. A lot of the time it seems like these people came out with this first, these people came out second, but the reality of it is somebody is behind the scenes doing the cost analysis and some companies say, 'Yes, we want to do this when it's expensive.' Some want to do it when it's cheap but not so good.

Nintendo errs on the path of new tech, cheap as possible, make up for it in software. Microsoft... I don't know why they did Kinect. It seems very un-Microsoft of them to be honest.

That might be the case. Maybe they took the path of, you know what? We'll eat the cost of the hardware.

In our research we certainly thought the sensor could sell for cheaper, but at the same time, when you're dealing with those companies, they're not always honest with you up front. The might say the cost is X and X, and then they say, 'We've got to put this extra chip in there,' and by the end the cost is triple or double. You're like, 'We can't launch with this cost.' There's a bunch of politics going on in there as well.

If you combine the two systems it would be nice, because you can use Kinect for body-tracking and Move for precise tracking. That would be good. But if you tally up that cost, it's high.

We figured, we can do a bunch of what Kinect can do with just the Eye. The parts we can't do we can compensate for with the Move. For hands-tracking the Move is still a much better device because you get these subtle angles and the positions more precisely.

The EyeToy was a peripheral because you had the camera and you had games for that camera. It was tailored to that camera. With the Move, you can play a shooter game, an RTS, which is pretty awesome because there has been no real RTS on consoles. We can enable adventure games, sports games, party games. It just felt like we got a lot more for a lot cheaper and more robustly. It just seemed like the right choice, technologically.

We can certainly update it through firmware. The hardware specs we ended up with are good enough that we can get some more improvements out of them. The camera is still a good camera. I don't know how many more software improvements we can make. The real question is, do we want to? So far we haven't had any real requests from studios to improve the accuracy. There are a couple of issues here and there we can fix, but the majority the games are not even taxing it to its full accuracy.

Games like Tumble, for example, really use that accuracy. Games like Sports Champions and The Shoot, it seems the user barrier is higher. People tend to have trouble doing the actions precisely enough rather than the Move being precise enough to pick them up.

For Sports Champions, table tennis is quite a hard game on the expert difficulty. At that point you're thinking, well, how much more precise does it need to be? We need to decide. There's room for some more precision. It's going to be up to us.

One exciting thing is going to be dual-handed interaction. The Fight is doing two hands now. There's a lot more you can do with this concept of tracking your hands completely. Having more unstructured gameplay where you grab and throw things and really interact with virtual worlds using both of your hands. That enables this 3D multi-touch stuff you can do. You can push, pull, grab things and pull them around.

Internally, the studios are getting to grips with using this one-to-one motion. You've seen this in Sports Champions. They were one of the titles that worked the longest with the Move. The character control and animations are going to improve vastly because most games of this era were set up to do DualShock control. Everything was baked and scripted. With the Move you have this one-to-one control over the character – you've seen that in The Fight and Sports Champions.

There are noticeably some glitches and everyone's aware of that. It's quite good, in my opinion, for the time we had, but we can improve on that. That will be much better in the future.

People are going to experiment with the basics. Different camera angles and different setups of the HUD, things like that, just to make the experience feel closer and more connected. There's a bunch of work we can do there.

There's going to be a lot more shooter support. I was talking to the Killzone team the other week; they're having really good results. A lot of the best QA people on their team prefer Move.

It's not everyone that's converting, but they said a lot of people from PC prefer Move. People who've never wanted to pick up analogue sticks can do all right with Move.

A lot of the great feedback we got from MAG was, 'I tried the Move, the first two days I was just awful and then I got better and now I'm as good as DualShock, and then I don't even want to play DualShock any more.'

Even though you don't get much of an advantage, it's so much more intuitive and fun to play with it. You don't feel like you're wrestling with the hardware as much. So some people switch on that basis. They figure, neither one is preferable.

Other people in SOCOM have said that because the cursor is unlocked, that gives you quicker random access over the screen, so you can shoot well. For some games it's going to be beneficial in a competitive sense. We're still working that out, but there's a lot of potential. I don't think it's going to be as clear cut as people thing. There are a lot of big advantages to shooter fans.