Microsoft Natal. Will we see an increase in console sales when it arrives?

[mrstickball]

DirtyP2002 said:

mrstickball said:
One other thing I'd mention about the precedent of this happening:

Nintendo has had a great track record of breathing life into dead consoles with sweeping hardware revisions. They've done it twice: Once with the Gameboy/Gameboy Color, and another with the DS revisions which were decent sized overhauls. If MS does it right, we could essentially see the 360 break the typical sales peak at year 3, and maybe even peak at year 5 or 6 - a dream for Microsoft, really.

good point.

I think Natal will move consoles. Not just a big spike, the sales will be sustainable.

The media will go crazy about it, MS will advertise this like crazy, it will be bundled and the developer support will be there. I can't see it fail in any way.

Sega is working on it, Square Enix is working with it, Rare is focussed on it, Take Two is playing around with it, THQ got them as well, Lionhead has at least one Natal-thing coming up (Milo), EA has them, too.

And I would not be surprised if the Microsoft Game Studios are working on this as well.

A fitness-game is coming, I bet my money on this. MS already said that Natal will be their next generation without the need to launch a new console. So this gen will still last for a very long time.

Exactly. I think Microsoft will treat this like a true launch with a massive marketing budget on a similar scale of the 360 launch itself.

@Coolestguyever - The thing about NATAL selling isn't entirely dependant on the device/capabilities itself, but the fact theres a 99.99% that it will feature a console redesign. So on one end, you have totally new adopters buying the device because of new, major functionality, and re-buys due to the major hardware revision.

It could flop hard, indeed, but if it does....What is Microsoft out? A console redesign? So what? They'll just launch the 720 a bit quicker. In the end, it's the smartest move. May not feel like it come mid next year when sales are down, but in the end, I believe there's a very high likelihood that the system will do very good.