(Posted By: Eric Rees)
With the launch of Playstation Move this week, the only other system yet to adopt a motion control system is Microsoft’s darling, the Xbox 360. Microsoft’s “Kinect” is planned to release this November but the question that is on everyone’s minds is will it do well or be banished by bad pricing issues to that graveyard that includes the Virtual Boy and the Power Glove?
Talking with another person who is in the video game business we were discussing the viability of Kinect, what it will do and what it won’t; more importantly what it promised to do and won’t be able to do. While all those are enough to constitute another editorial, the fact remains that Kinect stands on shaky ground with consumers at this point and the way that Microsoft has been backing off of previously stated promises isn’t helping the cause any.
Read more after the break.
Talking with another person who is in the video game business we were discussing the viability of Kinect, what it will do and what it won’t; more importantly what it promised to do and won’t be able to do. While all those are enough to constitute another editorial, the fact remains that Kinect stands on shaky ground with consumers at this point and the way that Microsoft has been backing off of previously stated promises isn’t helping the cause any.
Read more after the break.
The biggest problem facing Kinect this coming November is the price. 149.99 is a lot to ask for a brand new technology that has been not fully backed by it’s own parent company. When my co worker and I were talking over Kinect I brought up the point that the price of it wasn’t low enough for it to be the “impulse buy” that Nintendo has cashed in on with the Wii Motion Plus last year. My co worker countered with the fact that Microsoft is trying to make Kinect into the “must have” item this Christmas for kids across the world. What?
If you’ll remember Kinect was announced around the time the same time as the iPad. Since we’ve all seen how well that has done, commercially at least, lets use that as an example. Before the keynote, speculation was flying that the price would be somewhere around 800 dollars for a piece of technology like that. At that price people were still going to buy it but Apple hit a home run when they came out and announced a 499 dollars price point, and the rest is history.
I honestly don’t see why Kinect is as such a high price. I’ll admit that I paid 150 dollars recently for the Halo: Reach legendary edition but that’s for something that I know about, something that I know was going to be good. Microsoft is a good company but going into this Kinect is going to have major bugs, no matter how much beta testing they do. To keep the price this high is just killing it before you let it out into the world. Kids can’t go to their parents and justify two full 60 dollar games for one system add on that has no games built in.
At this point Kinect is going to be bought, for me, when the it has been out long enough for the price to go down, which I expect many people to do. The Christmas rush will surely push a few units but this is a hard sell from both sides of the counter. How can you talk a mother into a piece of technology that’s almost as expensive as the system it plays on when they could get almost 4 used games at that price? Let’s hope that Kinect comes out and blow everybody away with it’s functionality or Microsoft will have to buy a burial plot next to R.O.B sometime soon.
If you’ll remember Kinect was announced around the time the same time as the iPad. Since we’ve all seen how well that has done, commercially at least, lets use that as an example. Before the keynote, speculation was flying that the price would be somewhere around 800 dollars for a piece of technology like that. At that price people were still going to buy it but Apple hit a home run when they came out and announced a 499 dollars price point, and the rest is history.
I honestly don’t see why Kinect is as such a high price. I’ll admit that I paid 150 dollars recently for the Halo: Reach legendary edition but that’s for something that I know about, something that I know was going to be good. Microsoft is a good company but going into this Kinect is going to have major bugs, no matter how much beta testing they do. To keep the price this high is just killing it before you let it out into the world. Kids can’t go to their parents and justify two full 60 dollar games for one system add on that has no games built in.
At this point Kinect is going to be bought, for me, when the it has been out long enough for the price to go down, which I expect many people to do. The Christmas rush will surely push a few units but this is a hard sell from both sides of the counter. How can you talk a mother into a piece of technology that’s almost as expensive as the system it plays on when they could get almost 4 used games at that price? Let’s hope that Kinect comes out and blow everybody away with it’s functionality or Microsoft will have to buy a burial plot next to R.O.B sometime soon.
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