360 will match PS3′s 10-year lifecycle says Shane Kim

Speaking in an interview with VentureBeat,Shane Kim, Microsoft’s corporate VP in charge of strategy and business for Interactive Entertainment said, ” We firmly believe that the Xbox 360 has a life cycle through 2015 (10 years after the launch). Project Natal is a great innovation. It will work with every Xbox 360 sold. It’s not about pushing more pixels on the screen. It’s about how to break down barriers that stop people from playing games.”

This seems to collaborate the theories of many analysts that this current videogame generation is set to have a greatly extended lifecycle, thanks to the upgradable nature of current consoles and the economic recession.

Kim also detailed what he thinks Natal has over the alternative motion-control efforts. “This is not tracking points the way that the Wii controller does or Sony’s new controller does. It’s tracking your full body movement. That alone is very different. It’s also got voice recognition. It has a multi-array microphone so that it can recognize different voices in a room among the different players. It also recognizes faces.”

Microsoft have confirmed that Project Natal is in such a finished state that they have been able to deliver development kits for it to various companies this week. They still refuse to talk any dates or actual software however.