That ties into "forced Kinect". The Edward Snowden thing happened at the worst possible time for Xbox.

well you are wrong.  my top games list for ps3 includes braid, flower, fat princess, outland, journey, various pixel junk games, knytt underground, guacamelee, and many other indie/downloadable only titles. i'd include fez but i didn't get a chance to play it until ps4. todays indies won't be any different then last gens indies (or AAA for that matter).  a lot of amazing games and a lot of forgettable ones. things like resogun, the witness, no man's sky, and transistor will still be on peoples "best of" lists i promise you. they will not be forgotten. 

it is no mistake that i preordered swapper, hohokum, and counterspy last week and didn't preorder the last of us. frankly this entire holiday lineup looks pretty shit to me. from the entire AAA lineup only destiny and little big planet suit me. to be frank, if not for indies i probably wouldn't be gaming anymore. 

That there is an interesting point. We know the difference between MS and Sony design philosophies as max RAM with MS and fast RAM with Sony. So the Kinect situation would not have influenced MS on that front, Xb one would have DDR3 RAM regardless, and it would be 8GB. Though maybe they could have made a last minute swap out for 12GB DDR3.

It certainly would have given them a lot more freedom in deciding how much grunt to give the APU. And they may have been able to get a slightly superior APU to Sony.

Well my top games for ps3 look quite different from yours

Here we go: Valkyria Chronicles, Dragon's Dogma, Dragon's Crown, Dragon Age Origins/II , Soul Calibur IV, Killzone 2,  Resonance of Fate, Tales of Xillia, Tales of Graces F, MGS4, Motorstorm.  These come to mind as my favorites from the ps3.

I got Resogun for free with a launch ps4. I still can muster any inetest in playing it.

lol, the mods already banned you for good reason. What in the world makes you think that I pay $60 for every game? In fact it's the PSN downloads that rarely drop in price compared to the retail stuff. IMO, it's the indies that are diluting the industry. It's like the case of original Wii and mobile where so many bad games are  allowed to the point where it becomes hard to find the worthwile stuff. We're heading there fast.

I think the removal of the Kinect from the start would have helped a bit, but I think it was a bit of a mix.

See, the DRM thing, that was a BIG no-no to much of the market, including many elements that had previously been quite loyal (here meaning spending lots of gaming time on) Xbox products, and may well have been planning to get the 'Xbox 720' before its real name, and its policies, were revealed. It put gamers on the defensive, made us feel like like we were essentially having things dictated to us 'This is how things will be in the market, because Future.' Even when it was reversed, what, a week or so after E3, it wasn't hard to figure that they were responding less to a 'Socially Conscious' urge and more, like most companies, to the fact that they didn't want to get slaughtered in sales. So their reversal, while bringing some people back to the fold, didn't vindicate them completely.

This led to people being far more stringent when it came to the OTHER things they disliked about the console; if DRM hadn't happened, more people might just have grumbled and bought the Kinect-required console anyway. But having already been burned by DRM, the response was "Oh no you ****ing don't," and there was no interest in 'meeting Microsoft halfway' because... well, why should we?

Throw in the smaller, nitpicky things that hadn't reeeeally been considered an issue before, but were now just stark reminders, in the wake of the DRM, of things that were just kind of irritating about Microsoft. Off the top of my head this included the paywall on video streaming, horrid Xbox Arcade publishing policies, the paywall on free to play multiplayer games, the home screen being filled with ads, all things that had existed in the previous generation, and had been tolerated, but now was on a list titled 'Reasons Microsoft Is A Dick.' These did get fixed, at various times, for obvious reasons.

Finally, factor in the fact that since the release of the Kinect 1.0 on the Xbox 360, Microsoft's non-Kinect exclusives had dried up to pretty much Halo/Gears/Forza/Fable, and a few titles ported over from PC. While Sony was looking, on the PS3, like this company filled with new and varied exclusive titles and IPs, the Xbox 360's later-half just looked stale, leaving some to wonder how the later-half of the Xbox One's lifespan would go.



So, yes, Kinect's removal would have helped. But not doing the DRM in the first place would have helped a LOT more, because it wouldn't have stuck the Xbox One firmly on the defensive.

Would love to see the sales breakdown of Consoles sold with Kinect vs without since the Kinectless version came out.

Biggest problem with Kinect is aside from Dance and sports games, it is not very good for gaming. The voice commands are nice when using apps and switching apps.

Should be interesting to see in MS keeps pushing Kinect even if they offer a Kinectless system or whether they just let it fade away.

And the answer to the OPs question is Yes. To some people it is a huge negative (even if didn't cost extra).

I have an Xbox One and love it. I wonder if it will get a better reputation once people actually see how well the console works with Kinect. Personally, I think MS hit a home run with the system. My Xbox is on all the time.