Why MS is keeping Kinect and didn't sell it for $350 - $400

[enrageorange]

S.T.A.G.E. said:

okr said:
Because without Kinect 2.0 it would rival PS4 as the most boring, most predictable next-gen console.

Why does everyone forget that the PSEye is optional with the Move? The Xbox and Playstation have been at parity in offerings since the Xbox was created. They have a tug of war over services and peripherals because MS is going after the same crowd Sony commanded.

 

The kinect and move were invented to compete with the wii remote. Simple as that. Microsoft had already succeeded in taking a significant chunk of sony's crowd prior to the kinect launch. Though they could lose them again this coming generation.

 

Anyway for the thread question, the 360 kinect has already proven that kinect can sell fine on it's own. Bundled or not 25million people payed at least $100 extra for the kinect device than they would have if they chose to skip it. What that means is that microsoft is risking losing potential sales by people who are admanent about not wanting kinect or want the cheapest console just to foster more innovation on the platform. Basically Microsoft wants to bundle the kinect with every single xbox so the userbase doesn't get fragmented. Short term it will probably hurt sales. But the long term goal is for xbone owners to view the kinect as something that is vital for the system and that will only happen if more developers are willing to innovatively incorperate the kinect.

Imagine if when the nintendo ds came out, there was a cheaper model that didn't have a touch screen. Games that just use the touch screen for inventory management and such would hardly be affected. But games that make extensive use of the touch screen like warioware, brain age, World ends with you, professor layton, elite beat agents, etc. would have probably never come out or been completely different. Add on prepherials are an increased risk to develop for because they decrease the pool of potential buyers for your game. 

Personally the original kinect never impressed me and I would have loved for it to have been a huge failure that microsoft swept under the rug. But that isn't what happened. So if there must be a new kinect, it just makes sense to bundle it with every xbox. Because that is the best way for the kinect to be an attractive platform to develop real games for. That is why I wish sony bundled the move with all playstation 4's. I think the move works well with the games I've tried, but being a seperate addon almost guarantees that only first party games will make good use of it.