I'm just going to jump in and say I personally have a Wii that does nothing but Netflix (and the occasional Gamecube retro session) for about a year now.

You see what I'm sayin'? #Kappa

Lmao!

So, an electronic device is only innovative if there is something that uses it to a certain threshhold?
Kinect is innovative, the idea of Kinect is innovative, to argue otherwise is pretty darn silly.
It is the pinnicle of motion controls currently, it's set the bar.

The part that brings down the entire package however is the games, but to say that Kinect isn't innovative because there hasn't been a "Golden game" is laughable.

For most games, Kinect or any form of Motion controls, just won't work.
For some other games like... Mass Effect 3, Kinect works well as an "Additive" where you use it's voice commands to assist with gameplay interaction, in-fact games like End-War had similar functionality via the headset (Way before Kinect came along!), which worked well, just this time it's more natural, less cables and nothing stuck to your ears.

For another hypothetical game where Kinect would *really* shine would be in a game like Black and White, where your hand would be the hand of God.
In-fact Black and White had "Hand motion controls" before the Wii was even thought-of. - It looks unruly, but it actually worked rather well, would I play StarCraft with it? Heck no, mouse and Keyboard is *the* ideal control set-up for that game.

 

If a company has a monopoly, it only does two things: Increases costs, lowers the innovation, to hope that any for-profit company has a dominant position is never a good thing for consumers, they only wan't your money, they don't care about the actuall individual and they won't send you flowers and cake for buying their device.

The competition Microsoft brought to the table with the Xbox 360 made Sony more competitive, Sony launched the Playstation 3 arrogantly, with a high price, hardly any games and with graphical capability that wasn't in excess of it's direct competitor, not to mention a lack of OS and Online features right out the gate.
Without decent competition a company becomes complacent and lazy as their focus shifts to maximum profit for as little as possible investment, thus it's  always a wise thing to forget about being loyal to any specific company.

In the case of Microsoft, they were blatantly moronic for trying to implement DRM, only one company has managed to pull it off and been loved and adored by all and that is Valve, however they did try to do something *different* and if it worked, it could have paid off in spades, the irony is with the lacklusture sales of the Wii U and the Xbox One looking like it might be relegated to a significantly smaller percentage of market share... It tells the industry (And most importantly Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo) that all consoles should essentially be the same.

The problem with game variety also has nothing to do with the hardware or the company that makes the device, it's actually the gamers fault, gamers would rather give a company like Activision or Electronic Arts millions of sales and billions of dollars than support something like a Japanese RPG, publishers *really* like to play it safe and build games they will get a return of investment on, they are a company after all it's not a smart business move to only make games that loose money.

This is actually how Star Citizen and Planetary Annihialation came to be, they weren't seen as "Profitable" games by publishers, thus didn't receive much backing, thankfully due to the PC's open nature and far more generous communities gave millions for those games to be made. (In the case of Star Citizen, PC gamers have given almost 35 million I imagine to development.)

If you wan't the industry to change, then start supporting the smaller guy and not the giant empires that EA, Activision and Ubisoft have built.

The consoles are fine, I don't quite understand why people keep whinging about innovative hardware when really we had to wait until Wii for console with a genuinely new control method, so that's over 30 years of consoles which managed just fine

The reason why those systems didn't have these problems was that games continued to innovate so everything was always new, but right now things are atrophying because rising dev costs leave big devs reluctant to take risks or make interesting smaller titles because they are too risk-averse and opportunity cost means they think it isn't worth it

Big cookie-cutter AAA titles are in my opinion mostly to blame and have come at the expense of other genres, compounded by the struggle of Japanese devs (which is another discussion in itself) which has further compromised variety

My hope is that indies begin to evolve and begin to make bigger retail titles but without compromising their independent spirit and drive to innovate, suring up the market beneath the CoD behemoths and restoring the variety we used to experience in previous gens

if there's one thing the past has proven than it's that it's anything but good for gaming if playstation is not on top. call me fanboy but so far i can remember, nobody complained that gaming was boring during ps1 an ps2 era. could it be that sonys is actually the only one who's trying to be innovative on the software side whereas the other 2 console manufactures are trying to fool people with countless none practical and therefor useless "hardware innovation" to distract from the fact that they

a) have absolutely no clue of how to be innovative on the software side or
b) simply don't want to because they realized it's much easier to cater to people who have no gaming history?

and the really sad part is that so many of you out there fall for it.

Basically, it's every richardhutnik thread ever.

I've read this post like five times and I still can't figure it out...

"Sony is the hero we need, Nintendo makes nothing but Mario, and Microsoft fans think gaming started when Bill Gates invented Halo."

In a while?