Specs Declare Kinect To Have A Webcam Resolution with Two Active Players

Yikes.

Reception towards Kinect hasn’t been necessarily positive amongst the gaming community, and now that the full specs for the peripheral have been posted online by Play.com, it doesn’t look like the reception will necessarily get better. It looks like Kinect will launch this fall with a 57-degree horizontal field of view, a required 175MB of storage space, a maximum 640 x 480 camera resolution (webcam quality, essentially) at 30 frames per second, and here’s the kicker- support for six people, but two active players at a time at most.

When Microsoft first trotted out Natal, they claimed that it could support four players at most, and when Dance Central was announced, it was shown off with three players being supported at once. It looks like neither of those things is necessarily true anymore, which is a shame. Limiting the motion control to two people at a time will be harsh for party games, but as CrunchGear points out, it’s not like you could fit them in all at one time anyway.

While I was never convinced that Kinect would be a necessary purchase for myself, this news is still going to be hard to digest for people who were on the fence about Kinect. Is there anyone out there that doesn’t mind having only two players at a time and is still all about the Kinect train? (This train has no conductor, by the way. You are the conductor.)

Note: In my article about how Microsoft “won” E3, I stated that Kinect could handle eight players, making it the cheapest option. It’s clear now that this is no longer the case, (Microsoft said four in the past, and a third source said eight) and one of my points regarding Kinect’s price is nullified. I only point this out because I promised I would if it came to light that I was wrong. So, you know- I was wrong.