Kinect "is as core to" 360 "as Live is," says Spencer

Microsoft Game Studios boss Phil Spencer has told GameSpot that Kinect is as vital to Xbox 360 as Xbox Live.

Speaking at a Kinect launch party in San Francisco, Spencer said there is more third-party core content on the way.

"Well we view Kinect as a fundamental part of the [Xbox 360] platform," said Spencer.

"It is as core to the platform as [Xbox] Live is. And we think about the all products in our pipeline, including things that haven't been announced. And just like there's an [Internet] pipe connected to the dev kits, there's a camera connected to the dev kits.

"So you think about those dev kits and those teams and that creative space, and how they want to add [Kinect] to that experience.

"I think over time for first party, you're not going to see that differentiation between "Is that a Kinect game?" and "Is that not a Kinect game?" You're just going to think about these things as 360 games. Now that doesn't mean there's no controller included.

"This is just like Live, since Live is used in many different ways across many different experiences that we build."

Spencer added that it wasn't forcing third-party publishers to add in support for the camera for its games.

"This isn't about trying to ram stuff in where it doesn't belong," he said.

"For us, the experience is from the ground up, and that's why you see the first launch experiences are completely body controlled.

"Now one thing we, as a first party, don't want to do is dominate our platform."

Spencer added: "There's a real healthy third-party ecosystem on our platform; that's really important. We want to foster that. We get our games out to third parties early; we show them what we're doing in first party to help build interest and excitement."

"The level of support we're seeing from third party is growing."

Kinect launches on November 4 in the US and November 10 in Europe.