Similar in that it increased pricing on customers. However in functionality, kinect is invasive, it can GET IN THE WAY of you enjoying your console. Bluray had benefits, games will only get bigger and need a medium to hold them. Bluray had that answer which DVD simply could not do anymore. No disc swapping and being able to watch blu ray movies on the ps3 are always nice features to have. Having to shout at my TV and fight with my kinect sensor to work as intended is not nice to have.

You can watch Blu-rays on the Xbox 360, just not directly.
Disc swapping isn't really a big deal, how many hours would you have to play in Final Fantasy before inserting the next disc? A long time, certainly not every 5 minuits.

Kinect is also fantastic when a game supports it well, for instance using it in Mass Effect 3 to issue commands, it was used as an addition to the game, not as a main method of control and it worked well.
Despite the Playstation 3's high price and all the extra features it had, it really did nothing new or ground breaking that the 360 couldn't do.

Kinect just needs a single killer game and people will be sold on it, right now, it's best used as an additive to a game.
Personally, I wish Lionhead would do a Black and White 3 with Kinect support, years ago Black and White had "Essential Reality P5 Glove" support, where your hand was the hand of God, Kinect would be well suited to that kind of game.

In a linear game having to swap a new disc one or two times isn't a big deal. But in open world or hub-shaped world games, with regions that can be visited more than once, it can be a lot more frequent and annoying. Last time I was forced to do it it was in Lands of Lore III, and it sucked even more than its few mission completing bugs and its unfinished graphics look.

True, but that hasn't really been an issue on the 360. Developers have managed to fit most open world games on a single disc. There were two areas in Rage, you just swapped to go to either. You could explore the whole map in LA Noire using any disc, the swaps were just story content.

MS allowing madatory installs on the 360 really helped with space limitations of a DVD as well.

The only games I felt handled disc swaps poorly were Mass Effect 2 and 3. I found myself switching discs depending if I wanted to do main quests or side quests. Its a shame you couldn't install Disc 2 data to avoid that.

That's the thing, kinect is just not being used properly by developers. First of all, I think the tech itself needs to be sharpened, be more accurate, more consistent, etc. But apart from that, developers that try something on it generally release very mediocre titles, and others stay away from it. so it becomes this waste of tech sitting in your media center. I would take Bluray tech over kinect anyday. We have shifted to bluray tech so it is nice to have one sitting in my ps3 rather than having to buy a dedicated bluray player. Games are getting bigger and no longer fit on dvd discs, I know you say swapping games happens rarely, but it still happens in some games, and disc-swapping should have died when the ps3/xbox360 came out.

Who knows, maybe a developer will come out from left field and create the killer kinect game that will make it worthwhile to have, but the chances are slim. I think kinect needs another generation or so to REALLY become seamless. Good for MS trying this thing out, but it still needs improvement - and today, I would choose the bluray tech in my gaming console rather than kinect (and any other motion gaming stuff). I bought PS Move, biggest waste of money. I had a blast playing table tennis (incredibly accurate) in that game it came packaged with whatever that was called cant remember now. But it was wasted potential, and i just much rather simple button presses on a gamepad.

Forcing Kinect is like forcing move... T here i Said it.

Was Move forced though?

No but thanks for asking . Sony forcing blu-ray on. s  is just like ms forcing blu-ray. But kinect Have no relation to blu-ray.

Kinect works great and everyone has been using it. You hear people recording sh-t all the time, or saying some kind of command. the device is great for multi-tasking. So it wasn't forced it was a added bonus. However it is the exact same thing. If HD DVD would have taken victory, it would have been even worse off. Think of that.

The kinect gives us garbage for the most part and blue ray will ultimately become useful because of the larger disc space size that AAA developers are going to take advantage of.