Is kinnect worth it?

[Reasonable]

gergroy said:

VoiceofReason said:

Not really no, Kinect is a minor advancement on the pseye so minor Sony passed it up in favor of move, which is effectively capable of everything Kinect is and a ton of stuff it isn't, if you plan on waiting for better games to come out for kinect you'll be waiting a very long time since they aren't going to come what you see is what kinect is capable of, alot of people disagree but I ask you this, where are the tech demos? Move has like 4 of them, showing what it can be capable of, ps3 had a ton aswell and even the 360 had a few, if kinect was capable of something more MS would have gave us a glimpse by now, but it's not so they are just pretending it is, anyways it's your call but the tech isn't that impressive MS is just marketing it well 

try looking around the internet for what people have done with hacked kinects.  The device is capable of TONS of stuff.  There are some pretty incredible things people are doing with kinect.  Sony saying they passed on the kinect is just marketing mumbo jumbo.  They didn't want to take the risk and they are probably kicking themselves now.

OT:  I have a kinect, and I really like it.   Although, I will admit that a lot of my enjoyment is coming from the wow factor of the new technology (not so much the games actually being all that fun).  The games aren't very good to play by yourself, but are great for party's and the great thing about them is the accessibility for non-gamers (people that have never played a video game in their life).  The wii did a pretty good job about opening that door, but not in the same way that kinect can.  For example, I had my 92 year old grandma playing dance central on thanksgiving to the lady gaga song pokerface.  Needless to say, those pictures are being saved! :)

Both Sony and Nintendo were pretty clear they passed on the approach for two main reasons:

1 - cost - which makes sense.  Look at Kinect today and wonder what it would have added to a console back before PS3/Wii launched?  Way too much.  MS picked it up and focused on it when costs were lower.  Which is good for MS but you can understand why Sony/Nintendo were put off at the time

2 - applicability, particularly for Nintendo.  Nintendo wanted a single control scheme.  Kinect doesn't offer that.  If you think it does then use a 360 without a gamepad at all going forward.  Kinect is great as an additional interface, but no use if you want a single interface as Nintendo did.  Sony clearly wanted to stick with gamepads and look to a fresh Eye iteration.  I think they did miss more than Nintendo at this point by not looking more at a Kinect approach with the Eye for PS3, but again you can understand why they passed.  Sony also clearly wanted, as a hardware centric company, multiple controllers you could sell a'la Move rather than the one shot of Kinect, plus they know they could keep Move and have Eye2 match Kinect later if it became attractive enough (this angle will be one to watch I think).

 

None of this makes Kinect bad or something they were wise to skip in hingsight, but they skipped for perfectly sensible reasons both have articulated, no mumbo jumbo at all.  Cost for both seems to have been the main issue over everything else in their public comments.

Imagine Wii launching at a much higher cost with something like Kinect, and can you imagine what a launch PS3 would have cost with something like Kinect in the mix plus the Blu-Ray, etc?  It's pretty easy to see why the cost of Kinect at the time - which would almost certainly have been higher than the cost we see today to purchase it - would have been a huge barrier.

MS had advantages coming to the party later with its choices and also in terms of the potential for Kinect with PCs - which has been well illustrated already by the hackers.  For MS, Kinect is clearly a better choice.

It's important to put things in context to really understand each companies decisions and how they made sense at the time.

EDIT: BTW all this should be on another thread.  This one is just about giving yes/no reasons to the OP as to whether Kinect is worth if right now in light of his noted interest in the device.