Eating Words: Kinect and Move are Looking Like Hits
By Jared Newman | Wednesday, November 3, 2010 at 5:13 pm
In the past, I’ve been a skeptic of Kinect for Xbox 360 and the Playstation Move, Microsoft’s and Sony’s respective motion controllers. The prospect of selling the public another Wii, I thought, was hopeless without killer software. So far, it looks like I’m wrong.
Microsoft has raised its sales expectations for Kinect from 3 million to 5 million, Bloomberg reports. That’s based on pre-sales, retail orders and consumer interest for the motion-sensing camera, which launches November 4. To put this in perspective, Microsoft has sold 44.6 million Xbox 360s since the console launched in 2005.
The Playstation Move, a Wii-like wand tracked by a set-top camera, is also doing well so far. The controller officially launched on September 19, and Sony sold 2.5 million of them between the United States and Europe in one month. Lifetime Playstation 3 sales are at 41.6 million.
Despite my initial skepticism, I never wanted the Playstation Move and Kinect for Xbox 360 to fare poorly. I just want to see better, more interesting games. Kinect’s launch portfolio subsists largely on dance, exercise and party games. The Move took a similar approach, while also padding its line-up with motion control updates for existing games like Heavy Rain.
While Nintendo was able to carry the Wii on franchises like Mario Kart and New Super Mario Bros. along with the runaway success of Wii Fit, Microsoft and Sony will have to lean more heavily on third-party support. At the very least, a healthy user base will encourage more publishers to invest in more games — Activision, the largest video game publisher, is most notable for its wait-and-see approach — but ideally, it’ll enable them to take risks and push the really cool tech that Microsoft and Sony have created.
I wasn’t wrong about everything, at least. Although limited pre-orders made Kinect look like a sold out product, Microsoft told Bloomberg that Best Buy, Amazon and GameStop should have the device in stock on launch day, as expected.
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November 4th, 2010 at 3:34 am
Don't eat too soon.
November 4th, 2010 at 11:39 am
I still have serious doubts about PlayStation Move. I can't imagine it having the same massive mainstream success that the Wii had, when the commercials do nothing to differentiate the experience of using PlayStation Move from the experience of using a Wii.
Kinect seems pretty cool, but I feel like I sort of got the whole motion gaming thing out of my system a few years ago when the Wii was new.
July 2nd, 2011 at 3:20 pm
.) An interesting discussion is worth comment. I think that you should write more on this topic, it might not be a taboo subject but generally people are not enough to speak on such topics. To the next. Cheers