Xbox Gaming in South Africa

Motion control is going to have a big impact on the gaming industry this year, with both Microsoft and Sony bringing their toys out to play in 2010. As always, price will play a major role in swaying consumers to one or the other, and according to a report by GamesIndustry.biz, Microsoft are already reducing costs on their motion sensored controller.

In an effort to deliver the more attractive option, Microsoft has removed the internal processor from Project Natal which is essentially responsible for the 'bone system', making it easier to update, but more importantly, cheaper to produce. Industry sources are claiming that the move "doesn't have an effect on the existing system lag of about 100ms, while a software solution should enable Microsoft to update the system more quickly and regularly than a hardware solution."

Instead of relying on the additional chip in the Natal hardware, the number-crunching will be handled on one of the consoles three Xenon processors. The idea is that few games use all of the processors capacity anyway, so there is room for a little more load. According to Project Natal's lead developer, Alex Kipman, that load equates to around 10 to 15 percent of the Xbox 360's processing power.

With money as tight as it is these days, Microsoft obviously sees the need to cut back where possible in order to bring their forthcoming tech to the market at the most competitive price possible. Let's just hope that the software solution doesn't end up giving us a lesser product with too many compromises.