Almost a whole year left for its launch, Microsoft exec Robbie Bach admitted that it was a bold move to demonstrate Project Natal that early in development during last year's E3.
But that bold move, he noted, was key to rally lots of developers behind the project from its start.
"We wanted third-party publishers to know that it was real and we wanted them to have developer kits and to get them working on it," Bach told Canada's CBC news.
"We have something like 70 percent or 80 percent of the publishers in the world already doing Natal-based games," he boasted.
But that's not all. "Our first party studios [Microsoft Game Studios] are [also] very focused on this. We want to have a few titles from Microsoft that show the way and then we want the breadth and power of the ecosystem from our partners to bring lots of new ideas, new innovations, new concepts to the marketplace."
Project Natal is scheduled for release by November 2010. Bach believes that Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 will enjoy a 10 years life cycle, while Nintendo's Wii won't. "There's still plenty of power available in the Xbox 360, there's still plenty of power available in the PlayStation 3. Nintendo probably can't say that. They may have a capacity and a power problem on the graphics side that they need to deal with. But when I look at the [overall] cycle, I think there's still plenty of upside given what we have today."
