Microsoft announced on Tuesday that it will be selling a Kinect-free version of the Xbox One, first going on sale June 9 at the price of $399.
“There’s a lot about Kinect that I really love, but we’ve also heard from people that they just like to play games with controller in their hand,” Xbox head Phil Spencer said in a video statement. “What we wanted to do was for those people [was] to make sure there’s a version of Xbox [One] that really meets the exact needs that they have.”
This news comes as a major surprise as last August at Gamescom Microsoft corporate vice president Phil Harrison told Metro’s David Jenkins that the company had “absolutely no plans at all” for releasing a version of Xbox One without the Kinect.
However, despite this new version of the Xbox One, Microsoft still appears to be remaining firm in its support for the Kinect and is convinced consumers that buy the Kinect-less console will eventually dig into their wallets and buy the gesture and voice command box separately.
“If later on after they’ve owned Xbox [One] for a while they see what other people are doing with Kinect [and] they decide this is something they want to add, they can go out and buy Kinect,” Spencer said.
“As excited as we about the new Xbox One option, clearly if you use Xbox One with Kinect you have the best experience,” Xbox chief marketing and strategy office Yusuf Mehdi said.
In addition to the console news, Microsoft also announced that its Games with Gold program would finally be coming to Xbox One in June.
From the looks of things, Microsoft is going down a similar path that Sony has already treaded with its Playstation Plus by offering “subscription-based access to free games,” with the first titles available from this new program on the Xbox One being Halo: Spartan Assault and Max: The Curse of Brotherhood.
Sony’s Playstation 4 is retailing for $449 in Canada at the moment.