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rboxman on 17 April 2014
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Shinobi-san said:
czecherychestnut said:

Agreed, that part of MS's XB1 launch made no sense. MS PR made a big deal about the improved capability of the new Kinect, mentioned that the XB1's lower specs were in part mitigated by the improved immersion thanks to the new kinect, yet when it released there is nothing to sell it other than the fact the UI needs it. Sony has shown that you don't need the expense of the Kinect hardware to handle voice commands and face recognition, the two things that many XB1 fans crow about. MS could have done the same with the original Kinect hardware without all the additional investment, or a simple web camera. 

You can tell MS don't really believe in Kinect through their constant defence of the XB1's specs and performance in cross-platform games. If MS really believed that Kinect provided a better gaming experience then they wouldn't need to keep defending the XB1's performance in these games because Kinect would make up for the lower resolution in gaming immersion, but they aren't doing that. MS needs to start actively selling the Kinect on its merits if it wants people to pay extra for it, and one Kinect game (Rivals) isn't going to cut it, it needs to be heavily used in all their first party games, otherwise it'll just end up like the Wii U's gamepad, an arguably unappealing and expensive accessory that just puts a barrier on entry to an otherwise fine gaming system. 

Good points!

Seems like MS wasnt sure on what they wanted to achieve with the X1. While i think cutting the kinect is the way to go...it also creates new issues.

The system and UI was designed and marketed around Kinect. They will need to backtrack on all of that, which once again will have a negative impact on their image. They will also need to rework the UI.

Also when compared to the PS4, the X1 spec is weak. People are well aware of this! This means that the kinectless X1 must be sold at a cheaper price than the PS4.

If MS was more decisive and focused early on in the design of the console these issues could have all been avoided. Either go all in with Kinect and release some killer software or remove the Kinect and be gamer centric like the 360.

Kinect should be removed from all aspects of "gaming" -- remove its usage of the GPU and remove its insistence on being used in games.

But other than that, Kinect is great --  Voice commands are very nice, Big screen Skype experience, Better Twitch experience, etc.  Basically Kinect is fine for OS-level tasks and experiences.

After that, they need to do what they can to make multi-plat games better: After getting the GPU back from Kinect and making their SDK better, there's still room for a firmware upgrade boosting GPU and CPU clock right (one can dream) hahah :)

Finally, deliver on exclusives; but multi-plat is just as important since there's so many of them.