Adinnieken said:
Yes, but what you don't see in those specs are the performance benefits of the Move engines. Except for the fact that Kinect actually offers a feature that no other company can duplicate to the Xbox's feature set. It offers a controller-less means of interfacing with the user interface. It offers a means for consumers/gamers to use voice activation and it offers a means for consumers/gamers to use motion controls. Neither Sony nor Nintendo have that capability. With either you have to have some controller to interact with the UI. This capability, along with the future capabilities that Microsoft are working on will give the next Xbox an advantage over the next PlayStation and Wii U. The companies Microsoft bought are were long paid for. The expenses long recovered. The cost of the original Kinect already recovered. The cost of the actual parts for Kinect were estimated to be $50. Kinect initially sold for $150, but then dropped to $100. So if Microsoft sold 24 million units at $50 profit, then it means Microsoft made $1.2 billion dollars in profit. Depending on how many of the 24m units were sold with $100 profit that would have obviously only increased the amount Microsoft made. 1.2B - $35m (3DV acquisition) - $70m (Canesta acquisition) = $15m Clearly, the cost of Kinect has been long paid for. The cost of Kinect 2 is hardly significant. The technology was bought when Microsoft bought the two companies. Likewise, Microsoft is a company that engages in research and design. The fact that Kinect 2 had any cost of development was a cost of doing business. It would have been budgeted in long before it began. The costs for Kinect were born in the purchase of the two companies Microsoft bought and in development of the Kinect itself. Kinect 2 doesn't have those expenses. That dramatically alters the cost of the product. So no, I don't think Microsoft's price nor the hardware capabilities of the next Xbox will be impacted by Kinect 2. |
Please got read the Digital Foundry comparison article. Those Move engines aren't some sort of "Special sauce". They wont' make up for the weaker GPU and the lower RAM bandwidth.
Motion Control and Voice are both features PS4 will be able to replicate. Navigating the UI via Kinect might sound cool...but who would want to do that? Isn't that what voice control is for? The controller is called a CONTROLLER for a reason....the way I see it, it's just another gimmick. It's not a selling point for me.
The whole second part of your argument falls apart when you see that Microsoft is throwing the Kinect together with each Xbox 720. THERE WILL BE NO $50-$100 PROFITS THIS TIME UNLESS THEY SERIOUSLY BUMP UP THE PRICE OF THE WHOLE PACKAGE. How on earth you can overlook something so obvious is beyond me.
