January NPD 2019

[The_Liquid_Laser]

SpokenTruth said:
Kinect is almost solely responsible for the X360 resurgence in 2011. I can't believe we are on this site and many of you are denying it.

The problem with this "widely accepted fact" is that it is neither widely accepted nor a fact.  It is not widely accepted, because several of us are saying the contrary.  It is not a fact, because it is difficult to actually find a person who was really excited about Kinect.  This is especially true if you interact with people in real world USA.  On paper Kinect Adventures sold a lot more than Halo.  And yet finding a flesh and blood person who liked Halo is easy.  I don't like Halo, and yet all of these people keep coming up to me and saying how great Halo is.  On the other hand I actually do like Wii Sports, and I know many other people who do too.  Yet finding a person who liked Kinect Adventuers is really tough.  Where are these people?

zorg1000 said:

SpokenTruth said:

I'm truly lost why.  Is it hate for Kinect so they don't want to give it any credit?  I just don't get it.

I think that's it, people dont want to admit something "casual" was responsible for such large sales.

I certainly don't hate Kinect.  In fact I think it is a hilarious device.  Ironically it is the people that hate motion controls that seem the most willing to praise the Kinect and say how great it was for the XBox360.  I actually like motion controls.  I wish Nintendo made more motion control games.  But as someone who likes this type of game, I can tell you that motion control fans didn't like Kinect Adventures.  It was never a craze.  

I don't like FPS games.  I couldn't tell you which entries in the Call of Duty series were the good ones and which were the bad ones, and they all sell many millions of copies.  And yet fans know exactly which ones are good and which ones aren't.  Perhaps you can't tell which motion control games actually got people excited, because you don't even like this kind of game?

zorg1000 said:

Shadow1980 said:

If I may add some anecdotal evidence, I knew nobody who was a non-gamer that bought a 360 just to have Kinect. Also, I worked at GameStop in 2011 during the height of Kinect's popularity. I do not recall any such enthusiasm from periphery demographics over the Kinect. Granted, it was a short-term job and my tenure didn't extend into the holidays, but still, I saw nothing to suggest that hordes of casuals and non-gamers were slavering over Kinect.

And to offer some more concrete data, the Kinect did well itself, but most of the games released for it did not. There were a small handful of games for it that attained over a million in sales, but certainly nowhere near as many copies as Kinect units. And it's not like it's only casuals that play party games. I imagine the Venn diagram of "casual" and "hardcore gamers" would overlap in a non-trivial area labeled "people that play party games." Furthermore, the Kinect had utilitarian value beyond just playing those party games. To once again offer some anecdotal evidence, I do know people who already owned a 360 and bought a Kinect both to have a fun party game to sit on the shelf between copies of CoD and Halo, but also because it was a neat new gadget that had voice, facial, and gesture recognition abilities. Eventually, the novelty wore off, but at the time it seemed cool.

In short, the idea that the Kinect could have been bought predominantly by regular console gamers, with non-gamers forming a relatively negligible portion of Kinect sales, is perfectly plausible.

Did you not see my charts from the other day? The 360 was already resurgent in 2010 when the 360 S was released. The Kinect did not appear to provide any additional boosts outside of giving November a better YoY boost than what September and October got. And the 360 was only up 7.7% YoY in 2011, with nearly all of that boost coming from the Jan.-May period as that was the period in 2010 before the 360 S was released. The June-Dec. period of 2011 was up only about one percent YoY.

In Europe, sales of the 360 were actually nearly flat in 2011, and in Japan is was down quite considerably.

 

Considering the 360 was already almost at 60M by time the Kinect was released, I somehow doubt it was trending towards only 60M lifetime. As mentioned, the 360 already had life injected into it with the S model, with the only obvious additional boost coming from Kinect being in Nov. 2010.

Also, you do mention the obvious corollary of "The Kinect was the main thing responsible for good 360 sales in 2011," that being "Without the Kinect, the 360's sales would have suffered in 2011." Well, there's no evidence that would have been the case, either. Slimline models clearly exhibited their capacity to produce substantial long-term boosts to sales, regardless of whether they're concurrent with a price drop or not.

And I already mentioned the Kinect's effect on sales outside the U.S. earlier.

Oh, and PS Move had no measurable impact on PS3 sales. Even in Japan where sales are tracked weekly, there wasn't any obvious bump the week of or following the PS Move's release.

Are you sure? It's far from implausible. If we submit that the GameCube was a "conventional" console (i.e., a more or less conventional standard gamepad, comparable power to the PS2 & Xbox, and a significant overlap with them in terms of third-party titles), then comparing the PS2 and 360's shares of conventional console market during the generation proper shows that the 360 was quite dominant, comparable to the PS2' dominance.

I do have to point out that the PS2 had no real competition for most of 2001, while in 2006 the GameCube and especially Xbox simply cratered. Likewise, the 360 was by its lonesome for the first ten months of 2006, hence the large percentages in those years.

In any case, the 360 dominated the PS3 just as the PS2 dominated the GC & Xbox, aside from a couple of brief periods for both where the competition narrowed the gap. In addition to large plurality or majority market shares during Gen 6 proper, the PS2 managed large lifetime numbers by having strong legs well into Gen 7. Meanwhile, the 360 managed its large lifetime numbers mainly during the generation proper, which was a protracted generation in general, but one with weaker legs.

In short, the 360 managed to bust the 40M mark simply by besting the PS3 by a considerable margin. It had a year's head start to further add to its total (though that's not why it beat the PS3, as head starts never seem to matter much), and it had strong market share of the conventional console market (which was just it and the PS3). It's late peak and its strong sales in that peak appear to be due primarily to the 360 S, as I've explained before. The Kinect was not totally inconsequential, and had a short-term impact on sales, but I do not see anything in the data to suggest it was the primary factor for the 360's success from Nov. 2010 onward.

A big problem with this post is at the beginning you talk about a large amount of hardcore gamers that play party games are who bought Kinect but later on exclude Wii from your marketshare comparison when going by your previous statement a whole bunch of Wii sales should consist of hardcore gamers who also like party games since Wii was the ultimate party game system.

Why is Kinect considered a novel device played by hardcore gamers but Wii is considered a novel device played only by casuals? Also why are you assuming that PS2 didnt have a large amount of casual gamers? The entire PS2 vs 360 marketshare part just doesnt make any sense.

 

June-December 2011 being up YoY actually supports that Kinect was moving hardware. PS3 Slim released in Sept 2009 and look at the huge YoY decline in Sept-Dec 2010 compared to Sept-Dec 2009.

What Shadow1980 says about the Kinects other capabilites makes a lot more sense to me.  When they first XB1, they focused a lot more on its TV capabilities than they did on Kinect games.