I see this happening as well. Damn, this thread went to shit in the 5 hours I was not here...

Here is a question Squil... If Kinect is a massive success, and sells a boatload, eclipsing the Wii...Will Sony execs be kicking themselves and saying "Damn it, we copied the wrong shovelware filled peripheral?"

I hope my posts didn't imply that I don't think move is a piece of shit as well. Motion gaming as a whole is a terrible thing. 

www.vgcharts.org

Go here and see if the FPS genre is dead commercially.

www.metacritic.com

Go here and see if the FPS genre is dead critically.

Honestly. I leave for two years and these are the arguments here?

Game reviewers and sales, perhaps my least two important metrics for determining game quality.

I agree. If anything, this just reeks of desperation on their part. If they were so confident in this product, they wouldn't have to spend so much money on advertising for this thing. Even if this thing does turn out to sell well during next month & December, next year is when the real, true test of Kinect's popularity will begin. And I think that the popularity & hype for this thing is just going to fade into obscurity after December's over.

Sony barely advertised for PS Move & it has gotten about 1.5 million units sold in Europe alone.

The way I see it is that the day Sony and Microsoft got in to gaming and started their pissing match, I knew it would come down to this. When a company like Sega, who's been making games for 40 years gets booted out of the hardware industry due to the fact that it can't take as big of a loss on selling hardware as the other companies...the party is over. Afterwards its  all about bottom line ($$$)...

When you have 2 corporate giants like this who really are only in to gaming cause they saw a potential to make huge profits, and are trying to maximize revenue, they will not look to please the core gamers as that gets hard. Its easier to wow the non gaming crowd and take their dollars.

Of course, it took nintendo to give them an idea as coorporate giants are usually low on those...but once they have an idea, they can spend their stockpiles of cash on marektting it and make it more accurate and cool.

Now with all that core gaming pride talk aside....from a business perspective, its hard to deny the billiance of Kinect. Its much more marketable than Wii or PS Move.  MS isn't stupid and they know the idea of this tech will sell it...not the execution. So they want to make sure everyone knows its coming out...hence the large marketting budget.

Yeah I agree, it makes solid business success and they'll undoubtedly see great profits and sales with it. But as a consumer its hard  to watch them close down Ensemble and castrate Rare and then turn around and spend half a billion on Kinect. 

Very impressive, with every post you become an even bigger troll.

They didn't pump half a million into, "a shovelware filled peripheral." That pumped half a BILLION. The Kinect is gonna sell a shit ton of units. On top of that, it'll boost console and software sales. I'm sure MS has plenty to spend on games as well.

I'm confused about the Ensemble Situation. Perhaps MS felt they didn't need a studio that was pretty much dedicated to creating RTS games. However, Robot Entertainment which is former employees of Ensemble are working on Age of Empires Online. Perhaps they also wanted to leave so they can do whatever projects they desired.

That would be great If I could get a cut of each Kinect sold, but alas I cannot. As for age of empires, mmo being pumped into its veins was the last thing I needed to see. 

When does MS plan on starting It's marketing campaign?

I have not seen any commercials yet.