Quote:
Originally Posted by Arles
After having used the Kinect, I can see why some would want to bypass it in the XBox1. It was pretty frustrating to use for a ton of games. I don't think it would be a terrible idea for the Xbox1 to offer two packages - one with and one without to try and get more market share. That said, given everything I've read, I would probably lean towards getting the camera in the package to ensure I can utilize it if it does indeed get improved.
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The difficulty is that peripherals outside of core game controllers historically have an absurdly low adoption rate. Non-core peripherals, especially expensive ones, don't usually get sufficient market penetration for developers to be able to justify developing a game around them.
Sega CD did reasonably well, given its price tag. 32X fell flat. Most of the other peripherals are either fairly focused, such as the instruments that came with Guitar Hero and Rock Band, or never had much support outside of the games they shipped with, as with the Menacer and Super Scope.
That's part of the line Microsoft has to straddle with Kinect. On the one hand, you're up against history in terms of how well it's likely to sell and how much use you're going to see from other developers. Hell, the Balance Board sold a shitton for Wii by virtue of its bundling with Wii Fit, and I can count on one hand the number of non-Wii Fit games that ended up using it.
The other issue is that it'd be really hard to sell the public on buying a whole new Kinect by saying "sorry, the one you bought for Xbox 360 isn't good enough for One." They'd probably sell some anyway, but the adoption rate would almost certainly not be high enough to get AAA developers to plan for Kinect with their games beyond the most rudimentary uses. So you'd have resistance to overcome trying to get the market to buy Kinect 2: Electric Boogaloo at the same time as you're also trying to combat the historical irrelevance that non-core peripherals typically slip into.
If Microsoft wants to just sell Kinects and make some extra margin that way, they could split the SKUs. The Kinect offerings would be about as robust on One as they are on 360 (which is to say, not very), but they could do that.
Or, if they think Kinect is crucial to their vision for the platform, they need to bundle it, as they're doing.
I'm not a Kinect fan, and I'd rather it not be crucial to their vision, but they would be foolish to bet heavily on Kinect being a differentiator and then splitting the market.