Well, MS went and included the Kinect with every Xbone sold, in spite of the fact that no one wanted it and (apparently) no developers want to waste money developing for it. It seems to have driven the price up by $100, just enough to thrust the PS1 into the spotlight as the “affordable” console and it has more horsepower to boot.
From what I’ve read MS insists they will NEVER reneg and sell the Xbone without the Kinect. They are all in on this thing for some reason.
How big of a misstep was this for MS? Should someone lose their job at MS for this blunder after the strong presence of the 360?
I think the decision to bundle in the Kinect was just one in a looooong series of blunders by Microsoft. Honestly, the only reason the 360 got so popular was because Sony made even more mistakes with the PS3, and even they caught up towards the end of the 5-6 year life of that generation. PS4’s and the (sold separately) camera accessory are both nigh-impossible to find in your average urban market, so I’m sure there’s one or two Microsoft execs burning their vacation time before getting their pink slips right now.
I think that if you look at this objectively, you’ll realize the answer, in spite of all the rhetoric, is “It was a very minor mistake at worst”.
Fact:
The Xbox One has sold numbers that are best described as “extremely competitive with” the PS4.
Stipulation:
The Xbox One did NOT have some sort of HUGE advantage going in to this console life cycle - the 360 and PS3 had rough parity at the end of the last console generation, and there was no massive hype surrounding the Xbox One that wasn’t at least matched on the PS4 side (unless you count the negative hype.)
Combine these two ideas, and it certainly appears that the Kinect hasn’t really cost the Xbox One any meaningful amount of market share/sales. At least, thus far. And it seems unlikely to do so in the future.
You really don’t think they would have a higher market share if they dropped the Kinect? Maybe they should have dropped the peripheral no one asked for and put a few bucks more into the raw power. I’d say it’s pretty commonly accepted across gaming rags right now that the PS4 is more powerful than the Xbone and the multiplatform releases thus far have mostly performed better (hardware/graphics wise) on the PS4.
So far from what I’ve read the TV integration features of the Xbone are pretty weak. It’s crippled by the fact that cable companies won’t let it function as THE cable box. I don’t know anyone that enjoys controlling their TV using the voice and hand motion commands either. Couple that with the fact that there are no Kinect games on the horizon other than a dance game or two that anyone cares about and I can’t see how you could think this hasn’t effected their bottom line.
The PS4 is outselling the XB1 5:3 worldwide. Last generation Sony barely managed to claw its way to 1:1 parity. Since the systems aren’t THAT different in power, I have to assume the $100 price differential is a big part of it. Without the Kinect, the systems would cost about the same.
From what I heard, Microsoft’s plan is for Kinect to be integrated in every game. Thus they needed to ship the console with it so that developers could target it without having to make allowances for those who don’t have it. The PS4 was going to have the new Eye integrated for the same reason, but they dropped it, likely to take advantage of the significant price difference.
If the goal was to have separate Kinect and Xbox games, it would make more sense to have separate consoles.
I’m not saying that PS4 isn’t outselling Xbone, and it will probably continue to do so, but comparing the figures one should note that Xbox One isn’t released world wide.
I think it was a pretty big misstep. The PR fiasco that the Kinect kicked off was certainly responsible for a lot of folks who were on the fence deciding to go with Sony’s product instead, and the extra hundred bucks for the system itself made the PS4’s mandatory PS+ membership much easier to swallow.
I mean, take me as an anecdotal fer’instance. I bought a 360 a couple years ago because I really wanted to try out the Kinect, see what the fuss was about, have some good party games, etc. And I was underwhelmed. I traded the system back in some months later and continued to use my PS3.
Hearing that the XBone came with a mandatory $100 Kinect was one of the largest factors in my personal decision to not give the system a try. Not until I see the tech involved move past “novelty peripheral” and into something more relevant to everyday gaming.
Including the Kinect is not nearly the mistep that having a device that requires an empty room the size of a medium warehouse to use properly is. The Kinect is a DOA product and MS really needs to let it go.
The fact that the new management team at MS is looking to kill off the Xbox division may be one of the reasons that they are no longer that interested in responding to the percived failures that the Xbone is having. They don’t care if it beats the PS4 because they no longer want to keep it around.
But, like I said, that won’t happen unless developers can be assured that everyday gamers will actually have the device. Otherwise, they have to make allowances for people who don’t have it.
The problem is, most games are going to be multi-platform, and are going to need those allowances anyways. And the fact that Kinect did not improve nearly as much as it was supposed to. Some are saying it needs even more space now, instead of less.
No they wont. I changes the price of the game form $60 to $160. Some people will spend the money on the game plus peripheral but not enough to recoup the cost of a modern game.
The company that got out of the peripheral-required games business and is now the one major 3rd-party that’s produced successful Kinect games?
There’s been a few game-specific peripheral successes (DDR and Guitar Hero / Rock Band, mainly), but they’re rare.
There absolutely are users that like the Kinect. I use my 360 Kinect all the time – albeit mostly for media functions. It’s really useful for that. Kinect games are occasionally fun diversions, but largely underwhelming.
I don’t think including the Kinect was a misstep, but poor messaging about it certainly was. Especially the initial idea of not letting the system POST without it; that would have been awful. And MS really needs to step up to the plate and give us a killer Kinect app. It’s not impossible, but it’s not going to be a replacement for a standard controller in a standard game.
The extremely poor messaging about their DRM system was the nightmare that broke the system’s hype and launch much more than the Kinect.
But the pricing disparity absolutely hurts. MS really needed to find a way to sweeten the pot. If they couldn’t just take a bigger hit up front to match the PS4 pricing, they should have done something clever like including pack-in titles out of the box, actually including backwards compatibility, or…well, anything.
Eh. I like Kinect. I’d like to see better, more interesting uses for it. Bundling it makes sense for a company that believes in the technology, but it’s also their job to make the value proposition worthwhile.