If a Kinect game doesn't support sitting on your couch, Microsoft wants the blame placed squarely on the developer, not the hardware, and a company rep has now gone on the record repeating the same position on a two-player glass ceiling.
"I think that it all depends on the kind of experience that you want to build," Xbox general manager Kudo Tsunoda told VideoGamer.com during an interview at GamesCom. "Certainly if you look at a game, go down on the floor, 'Dance Central' is already incorporating a lot more than two players. So you know it's not necessarily any kind of limitation as much as it is developers just trying to customize the experiences around what they think is the best way to play."
"Dance Central" has been listed as a launch title for Kinect, so you won't have to wait until 2011 to host your first Kinect party. Plenty of games will opt to impose two-player caps, but as Tsunoda explained, that's not a trend limited to Kinect games.
"You can see like sometimes in a split-screen game it's hard to add more and more players because it's hard to see what's going on — and that's true of any game," he said. "I think something like 'Dance Central' you can see is already incorporating more than two."
Tsunoda is using the term "incorporating" loosely in this case, however. In every version of "Dance Central" that we've seen, the game only tracks one dancer at a time. People can still dance behind the lead dancer, but they have no impact on the gameplay whatsoever. That's even the case in Dance Battle mode, where players take turns in front of the camera.
We know for a fact that Kinect is able to track two players at once, as seen in "Kinect Adventures," but anything more than that is still unproven.
Would you like to see more games support three or more players with Kinect? Are you relieved to hear that Kinect itself will support more than two players? Share your proposals in the comment section below.