Molyneux: Move & Wii ‘Similar’

Creative Director of Microsoft Game Studios, Peter Molyneux, has been forced at gunpoint to give an interview to the press. You know how much Peter hates talking to games journalists, we’re lucky to get three words a year out of him as he’s so busy writing games.

“I find it hard in my mind to differentiate between the Sony Move and the Wii,” Said Molyneux, “They seem very similar in their scope. I know Sony and Nintendo would argue that they are different, but they kind of seem the same. “

Balls, Peter. That’s the difference, Move has a glowing ball. Have you not noticed?

“This is not me talking as a Microsoft employee,” continued Peter, “this is me talking as a designer, but I have to take my hat off to Microsoft because they really did go one step beyond what they needed to do. It would be very easy for them to have created something like the Wii, but instead they did go that extra mile and they said, ‘No, we’re going to make that huge step’. I think the real benefits are going to be shown in the next wave of titles that come out. ”

Microsoft did indeed go that extra mile. Quite a few extra miles in fact, all the way to Israel to buy up another company and use their tech for Kinect. Also, if ‘the real benefits are going to be shown in the next wave of titles’ what is the Creative Director of Microsoft Games saying about launch titles?

Source: UGO

38 Comments

  1. ‘No, we’re going to make that huge step, we’ll create something similar to the Playstation Eyetoy’

    • Hehe yes

    • ^ This ^

      Not only that but use a technology provider Sony previously rejected as a waste of investment when looking at ways to replace the EyeToy on PS3. Kinect is quite literally a PlayStation reject!

      As for the rest of the article you can read it’s about a PlayStation product in the headline and stop reading after “Creative Director of Microsoft Game Studios”…

      In other news I read a list of the announced titles for Kinect, it contains no less than 5 fitness games! In fact the list was pretty much 50% fitness games 50% party/mini-games, with a couple of dance games and Star Wars thrown in for good measure! And this is the all important 1st wave of titles that convinces you Kinect is the future of gaming?!

      “Pew Pew Pew” what is this 3rd grade? ;)

      • I think they do need to broaden its appeal to include core gamers & try and sell Kinect to the 40m+ install base, perhaps they have things in the pipeline but on current evidence they don’t have, but what I do think is,

        I’d suspect the market for fitness &/or dance stuff is huge, look at the millions of fitness DVDs sold every year, and my daughter has about 20 dance DVDs, and the Wii Fit sales alone would dictate this can be carried across to a gaming machine.

        Kinect is playing to a certain market which isn’t already drawn in by the range of core games on offer… there is no overlap they’re plain and simply going after a whole new market, so whilst people may see faults – Microsoft’s execs see opportunity.

  2. Excuse my french, but what a utter cockhead. I cannot stand that fucking twat, he talks shite and is games are nothing short of total BAB!

    What a twat!

    • Peter Molyneux had become a bit of a joke hasn’t he. Whenever he speaks, I nearly always raise my eyes to heaven. His reputation as a bit of a genius ran out when he left BullFrog in my opinion and now he’s a MS lapdog, good doggie wanna biscuit?

      TWAT!

    • That will be £2.50 for the swear box please ;)

      • Take £5.00 my friend, due to the huge errors during my rant ;-)

    • It is all BS but that doesn’t make him a twat. It makes him a PR person doing his job by promoting the company he works for.

      Just saying “This is not me talking as a Microsoft employee” doesn’t mean he’s going to say anything remotely negative towards Microsoft. It’s just a way of trying to be more convincing.

  3. I find it hard in my mind to diffrentiate between kinect and Eyetoy, i know Microsoft and Sony would disagree on the differences, but they more than just ‘seem’ the same, they practically are.
    This is not me talking as a Sony fanboy, this is me talking as a gamer, but i have to take my hat off to Sony for going the extra mile to deepening the game experience for all gamers, not just the casuals.Obviously Move doesn’t need to wait for the next wave of titles.

    *balance restored* :b

  4. love it when molyneux talks on record, foot in mouth usually occurs and nothing changed with this comment

  5. The sad thing is he USED to be a really god game designer. Now he is just a MS mouthpiece who can ony gush platitudes for his new masters. As a result anything he says these days just sounds ridiculous.

    • Literally a god game designer, great pun

  6. Wow, this guy really is a prick. So is he saying move will be like the wii, amazingly successful while natal will be like the eye toy, basically a flop? Unfortunately Sony will probably respond in kind, I just wish they wouldn’t. They have a blatantly superior product on th way, let the hardware do the talking and let the competition behave like jealous children.

  7. Move IS like wii, and Kinect IS NOT a huge step.

    • Well that indeed pretty much sums it up. The thing I find funny is that Sony is copying Ninteno while Microsoft is copying Sony

  8. What Microsoft did with Kinect is genuinely impressive but they lost sight of how it would apply to gaming. It happens at every turn in every industry. You get so wrapped up in a new idea you don’t look around to see how the real-world reacts or interacts with it. Somewhere along the line, there would’ve been countless MS staff thinking “hold on. It’s laggy, inaccurate, expensive, but you know what? I have bills to pay so will keep that little gem to myself”.

    As a device it could help revolutionise Graphical User Interfaces at tourist information centres, museums, exhibitions, etc. It needs to be more accurate but there’s promise. However, we have to come back to the games as that’s their primary course of action right now and E3 showed some gaping problems.

    Sony did the right thing and looked to improve on hardware currently available (and selling like hot cakes) so that people would see that they’ve made the correct decision.

    Either way, both companies need to show us the good stuff (read: games) and let us take it from there.

  9. If Kinect worked liked the lifestyle videos, it would be ground breaking, but the more and more we see of it, the more and more we (I) find to pick fault.

    Speaking to your TV to play, rewind, pause… or standing to wave at menu options looks kinda OK when models in expensively produced vids do it, but all are a pain in the arse for people like me, just gimme a button to press!

    The games aren’t designed for core gamers so I’m not sure why everyone seems surprised about that, the whole idea of Kinect is to sell 360’s to people who aren’t attracted by the core games (which the 360 already has in abundance, as does the PS3) so I don’t really see that as a fault and looking at how things are going in the mainstream press Microsoft appear to be getting that message across.

    With regards to the Move/Wii similarity, yes of course its similar but that could play into Sony’s hands there are 10’s of millions of Wii customers to try and sell PlayStation’s too and the similarity may help with the ‘up-sell’

    Both system will live & die by their software and so far what we’ve seen of actual gameplay there is far more in Sony’s locker to appeal to core gamers, meaning everyone who frequents gaming sites seems happier with it,

    but I do think Microsoft are either going down a very wrong path or a very right path – only the future will tell

    • Kinect takes away the very device that we interact with. Driving a car gives us something for nearly every sense. Touch, smell (rubber burning), feedback, etc. There is very much the feeling of “I just want to press a button!”. God knows, car interiors have been simplified to make the user experience simpler but I still want to change gears, to press pedals, to flip switches, touch buttons, hold onto a steering wheel!

      So far, Kinect makes every gamer look like they’re being attacked by a horde of angry cats.

      • Yeah, when you go abroad and end up sitting in the passenger seat of taxi (on the wrong side of the car) it feels pretty frightening not being in control, when you’re sat where you expect the steering wheel to be.

      • Burning rubber..Bring back ‘scratch and sniff’!.. :D
        I think one of the FIFA games you could scratch the disc to smell the pitch.
        I also remember quite a few years back seeing a ‘turntable’ advertised that came with a number of these discs, one of which re-created the smell of a log fire..lol
        Still, it’s interesting you mentioned smell as it’s one sense that isn’t re-created for gaming but i wonder how much it could increase your immersion in a game world. I’m sure the ‘tech’ has long since been abandoned but it could be a coup for whichever console manufacturer get’s it working in games.. maybe :)

  10. Dear Mr Molyneux,

    I think your argument about Kinect being genuinely different to the Wii (and Move) would hold more water if the first batch of Kinect games didn’t all look like what Nintendo were showing us 4 years ago.

    Thank you for listening.

    Kevling

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