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Microsoft Kinect

Asura

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tiedtiger

tiedtiger

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Yes traditionally. But for the last three years Microsoft having been pushing to be that family centric company, Avatards are slowly becoming the face of the company as a whole, they are on Windows 7 phones and I bet it won't be long until some Avatard pops up in word to give me a tutorial. It's a strange metamorphosis going on with the company and a very unnatural one. But I believe Kinect will succeed at getting big numbers for a year or so.

Sure. My point is that that effort hasn't actually worked. Microsoft have been trying to push themselves as the cloud-friendly company but nobody cares. Avatars haven't exactly set the world on fire, for example.

It's still the console of Halo Reach and the like, and the new hardware rev sort of rams that point home in oily-black-and-green glory.

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tiedtiger

tiedtiger

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The new Slim 360s are a much more appealing than the original design. They even have the friendly Avatards on the box to welcome in the casual crowd. The price of an arcade is also spot on for an impulse purchase at the till in Tesco. Let's not forget that games like COD are generally played by the casual as well as a hardcore gamer, so seeing a Kinect bundle and COD would be something for the whole family.

The slims are the most mis-matched product I have seen in years. The packaging says it all:

xbox-360-slim-box.jpg

It really just makes no sense. Shiny black oily death box. In nice happy surroundings. Who is this supposed to be for exactly?

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Stolly

Stolly

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The new Slim 360s are a much more appealing than the original design. They even have the friendly Avatards on the box to welcome in the casual crowd. The price of an arcade is also spot on for an impulse purchase at the till in Tesco. Let's not forget that games like COD are generally played by the casual as well as a hardcore gamer, so seeing a Kinect bundle and COD would be something for the whole family.

Sorry but thats just wishful thinking; kinects best hope, certainly in the first instance, is to sell to existing owners. Kinect plus a 360 will cost what £320 and you'd still need to buy a game or two on top of that. The wii packaged with wii sports is what half that price? And which of those two is most likely to appeal or even be known to family oriented casual gamers? And which one have they most likely seen and even played on around a friend or relatives house? And which one uses JLS to advertise..... oh wait a minute :)

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tiedtiger

tiedtiger

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Don't confuse me with one of those Kinect supporters, I worked on the bloody thing and hate it with a passion. I just can't see Microsoft letting this fail or even hit the middle ground between success and failure. They have to succeed with it.

It's actually pretty rare that a company manages to obliviously spend its way to success. The product has to make sense in some way and be aligned with both what the market wants and where the market wants to go next to get that genuine uplift. Microsoft have been trying to be an entertainment company for a long time and failed at almost everything that they've tried because their products speak more about the past, about what others have done, and have done better than them already. There's no compelling reason to get into their whole ecosystem because it seems half-assed and a knock-off. Kinect is another example of this sort of thinking.

Xbox is their lone real success in all this, it was an extremely expensive success, and they frankly owe most of that to Bungie rather than their own internal efforts. Most of the other bits and pieces of functionality on the Xbox 360 are tepid or rubbish. It is not the living-room-box that they hoped it would be, and most of the trinkets that they've tried to add to make it like that (like avatars) are miserable failures.

It's really quite weird watching a company with such vast resources hobble itself repeatedly. If they could only get their house in order they could do amazing things.

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Padlocked

Padlocked

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To clarify: I wasn't arguing whether or not it would work (I argued against Live! back in the day - I could do that for free on my PC!), just that it's part of what they're doing and have done before. MS aren't in the game of waiting for the next generation to try their ideas out.

Also, Massive Invisible Dog, how so?

My opinion: how can full body motion sensors ever be something that's not exciting? For fuck's sake, it's no wonder everyone's trying to get away from 'core gamers, we're a bunch of miserable cunts.

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tiedtiger

tiedtiger

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To clarify: I wasn't arguing whether or not it would work (I argued against Live! back in the day - I could do that for free on my PC!), just that it's part of what they're doing and have done before. MS aren't in the game of waiting for the next generation to try their ideas out.

Also, Massive Invisible Dog, how so?

My opinion: how can full body motion sensors ever be something that's not exciting? For fuck's sake, it's no wonder everyone's trying to get away from 'core gamers, we're a bunch of miserable cunts.

It could be exciting if it wasn't for the fact that Wii kind of went there already and bored everyone to death with cheap software that didn't have much long-term play value (with some notable exceptions of course). Kinect isn't a gigantic leap forward above that, it's more of the same just a little bit different.

It's a late-asymptotic product. Asymptotes are lines with curves which always increase/decrease toward the line but never quite get there. In marketing, it means a product category whose improvements are becoming increasingly less dramatic as time goes on. They're getting better, but the huge effort required makes it more pointless.

(Edit: My definition of asymptotes is all over the place. See here for a real explanation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asymptote)

Markets don't respond dramatically to late asymptotic innovation because it has a been-there-done-that quality. Blu-Ray, for example is a late-asymptotic product because HD and DVD had already done the sales job of better image, so all Blu-Ray has left is super-super-better-image, which it clearly IS but which the public don't really care about. Blu-Ray will eventually become normalised (it's being included in lots of players, therefore as existing players break or are replaced, it is adopted by default).

That's where Kinect is, basically. The software lineup in particular radiates a it's-the-Wii-on-Xbox which is instantly a dull proposition. Add to this that the innovations of Kinect don't seem to offer decent controller precision (much like the Wii) so hardcore gamers will tire of it quickly and you have a recipe for an Eye-Toy like product which rises and falls back very quickly.

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Padlocked

Padlocked

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It could be exciting if it wasn't for the fact that Wii kind of went there already and bored everyone to death with cheap software that didn't have much long-term play value (with some notable exceptions of course). Kinect isn't a gigantic leap forward above that, it's more of the same just a little bit different.

It's a late-asymptotic product. Asymptotes are lines with curves which always increase/decrease toward the line but never quite get there. In marketing, it means a product category whose improvements are becoming increasingly less dramatic as time goes on. They're getting better, but the huge effort required makes it more pointless.

(Edit: My definition of asymptotes is all over the place. See here for a real explanation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asymptote)

Markets don't respond dramatically to late asymptotic innovation because it has a been-there-done-that quality. Blu-Ray, for example is a late-asymptotic product because HD and DVD had already done the sales job of better image, so all Blu-Ray has left is super-super-better-image, which it clearly IS but which the public don't really care about. Blu-Ray will eventually become normalised (it's being included in lots of players, therefore as existing players break or are replaced, it is adopted by default).

That's where Kinect is, basically. The software lineup in particular radiates a it's-the-Wii-on-Xbox which is instantly a dull proposition. Add to this that the innovations of Kinect don't seem to offer decent controller precision (much like the Wii) so hardcore gamers will tire of it quickly and you have a recipe for an Eye-Toy like product which rises and falls back very quickly.

I'm not sure why, exactly, you're telling me what the public do/don't/will/won't care about. It's totally irrelevant to whether or not I am interested in the product and massively boring to boot. YYou appear to mix your opinion with sub-par regurgitated marketing lessons in an effort to lend authority to the argument that you don't like it. I'd be keen to hear more about why that is - but on a personal level, rather than as a case study against which I can be examined.

I might have agreed with the wii-on-xbox argument if I hadn't just heard all the most recent product announcements. Not that I thought it was particularly dull before though.

My viewpoint : When it doesn`t work as well as a retail product should be expected to.

Do you mean the whole 1ms-5ms delay thing? Yeah, it's a deal breaker if I actually buy one and it fundamentally breaks every experience I have. Then again, I couldn't pull off upper cuts in Wii Sports Boxing. And my son is 3 next year, and I reckon he'll love this.

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Hewson

Hewson

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That was a Microsoft with it's own direction, this Microsoft is chasing a market that frankly is dwindling away.

Just saw this. Do you mean dwindling away permanently? Or just that they're unlikely to buy another product in this gen when they've already bought a Wii?

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Scribblor

Scribblor

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Tiedtiger's one of those know-it-all posters who can't be wrong. :rolleyes:

Personally, all the restrictions on where you can have it, how much space you need, what clothes you can wear etc. actually mean that it probably won't work in my house if I buy it, so I won't. Combined with the fact that there's almost certainly going to be a dearth of games I'll be interested in and a glut of crap shovelware, it really doesn't look like the product for me.

I was massively interested when it was first announced, but each cut feature has made me less interested. I'd still like to try it out, and I hope that it becomes integrated into Microsoft's next console (in a way that will mean I don't have to knock down a wall and brick up a window in my living room to make it work properly).

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tiedtiger

tiedtiger

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I'm not sure why, exactly, you're telling me what the public do/don't/will/won't care about. It's totally irrelevant to whether or not I am interested in the product and massively boring to boot. YYou appear to mix your opinion with sub-par regurgitated marketing lessons in an effort to lend authority to the argument that you don't like it.

I don't think that's particularly fair. It's possible to be personally ambivalent toward a product and yet look at it from the larger perspective and say why you think it would or wouldn't work. It's also possible to hate on something but concede that it'll sell lots.

I'd be keen to hear more about why that is - but on a personal level, rather than as a case study against which I can be examined.

Personally speaking I'm just very meh-d by what Kinect appears to be. It really just seems to be Eyetoy 2.0. I had an Eyetoy back in the day, but it was only really fun to play with a couple of times at a party and I eventually just gave it and its games away.

Kinect seems to be more of the same. I can't see why I'd buy one as I think I'd get very bored of it for much the same reason that I never bought a Wii: Once I played motion games a few times at friends' parties and the like, I felt that was kind of that.

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suzzopher

suzzopher

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Just saw this. Do you mean dwindling away permanently? Or just that they're unlikely to buy another product in this gen when they've already bought a Wii?

I think that the Wii crowd are purchased out. If they were going to buy something like this, they would have done already and with Wii sales falling year on year, I don't see where Kinect fits if the market is shrinking.

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Scribblor

Scribblor

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Wow. The 'watched topics' thing really does seem to be fixed. Awesome!

Baryl, what games are you actually looking forward to on Kinect? Or are you interested in it for its potential?

(Sorry if this has already been covered. I haven't read the whole topic).

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Alex W.

Alex W.

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Gamers were tantalised into trying Xbox Live because it was built into games they were already buying, games that came with vouchers for months (months!) of free play. That's how I got on board - Halo 2 happened to have it, so I gave it a punt.

Nobody's taking a punt on Kinect for free. It's £130, or nothing.

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Hewson

Hewson

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I think that the Wii crowd are purchased out. If they were going to buy something like this, they would have done already and with Wii sales falling year on year, I don't see where Kinect fits if the market is shrinking.

Gotcha - not sure the market is shrinking so much as the hardware side has reached saturation for now. I think these people will buy another console at some point but to crack it again I think there'll need to be another shift as significant as the Wii was originally rather than a refinement or variation on the same theme.

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Gique

Gique

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Do you mean the whole 1ms-5ms delay thing?

No, I mean at best when it can take many frustrating attempts to choice a menu option, and at worst when the whole thing suddenly decides it`s not working and needs to be reset.

Lag`s the least of its problems.

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suzzopher

suzzopher

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No, I mean at best when it can take many frustrating attempts to choice a menu option, and at worst when the whole thing suddenly decides it`s not working and needs to be reset.

Lag`s the least of its problems.

Using Kinect outside of games is such a joy, I love it. But in game? Man it can frustrate :hmm:

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Padlocked

Padlocked

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Wow. The 'watched topics' thing really does seem to be fixed. Awesome!

Baryl, what games are you actually looking forward to on Kinect? Or are you interested in it for its potential?

(Sorry if this has already been covered. I haven't read the whole topic).

Mainly its potential, to be honest, which is why my original point was about this being the test bed and it maybe being the cornerstone of the next generation, much like Live! was on Xbox (and I don't care what we all say now, back then an online console matchmaking service that cost £50 a year was almost universally derided).

Having said that, I can see myself getting one a) for shits and giggles and b) because these games actually look interesting for me and my gaming habits now:

Brunswick Bowling

Child Of Eden

Dance Central

Adventures/Joy Ride/Sports

Star Wars

Milo

Rise Of Nightmares

Steel Battalion

Some of those will be a laugh over Christmas, some will be a great giggle with my almost-3 year old son (who is much more adept at wriggling and jumping around than handling a controller) and some could just be really interesting experiences. I also know my family will be pretty amazed by it, the same as they were the Wii (and I think discussions about the Wii's success and ongoing changes in that marketspace are a whole different ball game to anything we can talk about with the 360).

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scottcr

scottcr

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Just give them your iPod or iPhone with Talking Carl. It only costs 60p and will probably bring more fun over a longer period in your household than Kinect.

it's really funny when your kid starts shouting 'stop copying me' at Talking Carl... :lol: love it

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ras el hanout

ras el hanout

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Remember a couple of years ago when boyatsea told us all his family were into scene it. That's going to happen here, people like barry L will inflict this wretcherd device on their family and friends this Christmas and then declare it more fun than the wii.

I reckon that thq's tablet will outsell kinect.

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