Q: What can you tell us about that next-gen console ... and how should developers who want to build games for that console be preparing?
Isensee: The Xbox team has always been dedicated to enabling new, deeper, richer experiences for consumers, but it's too early to comment on what the future holds. Right now we're plenty busy with Xbox 360. In many ways, the next generation is already here in the form of natural user interfaces powered by Kinect. Nearly a third of the Xbox 360 install base already has a Kinect sensor. Up until the launch of Kinect in 2010, the only user input that Xbox 360 developers had to worry about was a handful of controller buttons -- a total of about 50 bytes per game frame. With Kinect, games have access to an incredibly rich input stream of depth and color and audio to the tune of 1.4MB of data per frame. That's about 30,000 times the information available with controllers alone! Game developers are still exploring all of the new experiences they can enable by tapping into the power of Kinect. Developers thinking about the future would do well to consider how natural user input can power their new gameplay ideas.