
People seem to be ignoring the elephant in the room when going on about Kinect's future success; the GAMES. Considering there are only like 15 games for the Kinect right now, 3 or 4 of which are ranking over 80%, and similarly only a few hanging around the top 50 in sales, and even fewer announced releases in the future, all signs point to a massive drop off in sales. It may be selling out because of the initial hype of the technology, but that cannot last forever. Sooner or later, the reality of the weak library is going to affect the hardware sales. Just like a console, the main point of this add-on is to play GAMES. And if it doesn't have the games to back it up, sales will drop, and will drop hard.
What games have been announced that can help push 20 million units? The only decent looking games I see that have been announced are Children of Eden and that Star Wars game, and the latter looks sort of like an arcade game that you play for 10 minutes at Gameworks.
In terms of game sales, only one Kinect game is really selling significant numbers, and that is Kinect Adventures, which is bundled with the hardware, so like Wii Sports, it's a given that it will sell. The other two best games in quality by far are Kinect Sports and Dance Central, which have sold 970,000 and 552,000 respectably. The other Kinect titles are nowhere to be seen on the charts. NPD had no Kinect software in the top 10.
Then you also add the factor of Japan and Europe, two markets that do not favor the 360, and it becomes clear that Kinect software is going to have an uphill battle ahead of it to sell. It's essentially relying mainly on America. If the games don't sell, the publishers will look elsewhere.
Everyone seems to point to the Wii and its motion controls as the driver behind its success, but the simple fact is the Wii would not have been a success without the strength of its library. Games like Zelda, Mario, Metroid Prime, Smash Bros, Wii Sports, Wii Fit, Wii Play, etc. These were all mega hits. Kinect just doesn't seem to have these calibur of games, instead it seems to be littered with rushed Wii third party ports. I mean, games like Your Shape, Joy Ride, Sonic Free Riders, Biggest Loser, Deca Sports, etc. This stuff did not sell on Wii, a console with an 80 million userbase. How on earth could they sell on a platform that will have less than 10 million users for awhile?
In order to sell 20 million or close to it, Kinect needs some killer aps.