Afrikan said:
I've always looked at it that way....
I guess it depends on whether you would buy Wii Sports separately. In Japan it wasn't packed in and it sold a lot of copies. Who knows whether Kinect Adventures has the same appeal.
Afrikan said:
what ever it is, I really hope they don't think it is mostly current 360 owners.....
MS realize that their demographic is really skewed towards 'hardcore', and after the success of Wii they see how much money there is in catering to the until recently largely ignored casual side of the market. Kinect is an attempt to win over that demographic. They barely bothered to show off how this would appeal to hardcore gamers at E3.
Zek said:
I think this is just a really dumb move, you don't launch a Wii competitor at $300 at this point in the game. Sure you save on controllers with 4 people but you can't put that on the box. Unlike Move, Kinect seems like a peripheral with virtually no use for hardcore games. They were aiming at the casual market and they've priced it right out of that. What's their demographic?
Kinect only works with up to 2 players.
Part of the genius of the Wii was the way it was designed to create new gamers. People who are pretty casual or totally unfamiliar with games are attracted because it has a simple, non-threatening TV remote like controller with a nifty feature of sensing the waving of your arms. They buy the machine, fool around with Wii Sports, and familiarize themselves with the controller. Turn that controller on its side and...it's a NES controller, the simplest form of the modern day video game controller. Nintendo can now sell people who were once afraid of video games something like New Super Mario Bros. Wii, which has simple, easy to learn traditional video game controls. Just like that, a non-gamer has become a gamer. These players might forever continue playing other simple 'bridge games' like DKCR and Mario Kart, but With the right marketing, Nintendo can get them to also buy its more 'hardcore' games, like Super Mario Galaxy or Zelda. Through this strategy, they've expanded the audience buys Nintendo's biggest games and created new fans for the future.
This all comes down to the design of the controller.
Microsoft have attempted to one-up Wii's casual appeal. So you thought it was cool pretending a wand was a tennis racket? Well now you can play without a controller at all, like magic! The problem is, there's no vision for the future here. From what we've seen, Kinect has virtually no uses for more complex games. Because there's no controller involved, there's no way to push casuals and new gamers into more complex experiences.
"So you liked playing Kinect Adventures with your hands, huh? How about Gears on a traditional pad?"
In this way, Kinect creates an Xbox market that is permanently bisected into casual and hardcore contingents.
This might not be such a big deal to Microsoft. Nintendo is a game company first and foremost, and its long-term goal is to get more fans of their systems and games buying their products. Microsoft on the other hand is a computer software company focusing increasingly on multimedia applications and hardware. Their long-term goal is to get as many people as possible using Live, so that it gets more content deals which they take a cut out of. Increasing the market that buys traditional games is not a priority for Microsoft like it is for Nintendo.
