It appears going Kinectless hasn't helped Xb one much, with weekly sales post going  Kinectless falling below the sales of Xbox 360's first summer.

So is this a question of damage done making recovery difficult, or was Xb one always going to struggle once it was realised it lost the specs wars? And yes specs do matter to a degree.

I don't think Xb one would be winning the generation, but I think launching with kinect as optional would have xb one in a better market share position than it is now.

What do you reckon? Makes no difference, or makes a lot of difference.

If they had avoided the DRM debacle they wouldve been in a far better position than they are now, the word of mouth after that pushed most on the fence to sony side. I don't think Kinect deterred early adopters.

Its a combination of forced Kinect, DRM shitstorm and resolutiongate.

I think Kinect ditch coupled with TitanFall launch with the price drop would have been smarter / better for the XBO. But I don't think anything (including TitanFall) alone could keep any momentum of interest in the XBO.

TitanFall's biggest flaw was lack of single player, even if they did really well on multiplayer, and I don't know of anything else attention grabbing to release on XBO besides TitanFall... so they basically went with all eggs in same basket.

This worked for them on Halo or Gears, but not TitanFall and the difference is that its not the best console for 3rd party games, so having a strong exclusive alone isn't enough. Not while the PS4 exists and is so much better for 3rd party as it is (at least for now).

Well, it deterred me personally. I had X360, and moved to PS4 at launch because I refused to pay extra for a piece of plastic that would be boxed in my attic.

I would have forgiven them DRM fiasco since they retracted it, resolution isn't a factor to me, but Kinect was the tipping point. The fact that Croatia is about 95% Sony country was just an added bonus, but would not have been crucial without Kinect.

And since I only have time for one console, XOne will never be a part of my household.

I think the XB1 plight is a combination of a lot of different factors. Also think kinect and it costing $100 more cause of it was the least of those factors. The kinectless SKU is just a last resort way of making an already bad situation a lil better.

I personally feel that sony seemingly did everything in their power to mess up the PS3 launch. $200 more than their rival, coming in 12-16 months after their rival, made a console that was to hard to code for which in turn made all devs favor the 360, so dev previews were always on the 360 (that has a way of making people think that the game is only coming to the 360)...etc. This gen, its almost as if MS forgot all that played in their favor and basically did everything they shouldn't have done.

Kinect was a bad idea. And incorporating with X1 was even a worse one.

It wasn't the Kinect the main reason that made the XBone being so far behind of the PS4 (it was important, but not the main reason). The DRM and used games policies were the sparkle that ignite he fire that's burning the Xbox brand down.

XBOX ONE has issues far deeper than launching with Kinect. Kinect may have something to do with it but I feel that the bad press pre-launch, coupled with PS3's strong finish (which boosted PS4's appeal) has more of an negative impact than Kinect.

Sales would not have been "this" bad, it would have probably caught up to the Wii U by now, but I don't think anything would have given them a global lead.