Kinect has had a negative reputation on forums, ie with traditional gamers. Outside of that it has done very well. That's a prime example, the traditional console audience just wants their usual thing, new ideas and interfaces are better spent on new audiences, traditional gamers don't want it which means programmers less likely to invest time and money in it. In other words a largely traditional gamer audiences scares away r&d time and money from new ideas and funnels them back into the same old stuff. Likewise with cloud, it's not even out yet but it's already been written off by traditional gamers, which resulted in backpedalling and now I don't expect anything to come of optional cloud this gen at all. It's the audience that cause that, along with their disinterest. Even still if they did use it and made say a cloud human ai for games, like Siri + Cortanna all put together like I had mentioned long time ago in another thread. So you talk to the game and ask "how do I get on that ledge" or "what dangers lie ahead", etc and the Siri+Cortanna ai responds, that's a perfect use of cloud and high latency tolerant. But traditional gamers don't care about that, all they want is new levels, powerups, weapons, etc, so it's less likely a company would make something like that with a traditional "gamers" audience because they just don't care, so why spend the money at all. But outside of them, new audiences would love sometime like that, so I argue that with new audiences we are more likely to see new inventions, new interfaces, new use of cloud and so on because new audiences are more accepting and interested in that, whereas traditional gamers don't care, will belittle it on forums, will fight against it, etc, and basically scare away r&d money from these ideas.
There's only two solutions as I see it. One is transform the current consoles to accept new audiences and ideas, but you can see how well that's going as traditional gamers raise their pitchforks in the air and constantly complain about everything from how cu's are being used, to how memory is being used, to wasting time on cloud and Kinect, etc.
The second solution is a new competitor who from the get-go goes after all audiences. So rather than just go after traditional gamers, they go after all audiences from day one. It would get ridiculed and maligned all over forums by traditional gamers but who cares, these new audiences don't read these forums anyways plus the new audiences spend more money anwyays. Think of the Wii as the example of this, they went for a whole new audience from day one and they were crucified for it almost non stop for ages, yet they went on to win the generation.
Something like that needs to happen again but with a wider focus than Nintendo has, less stubbornness than Nintendo, more resources than Nintendo has, and with more user friendly focus than Nintendo has. Amazon should be a good candidate for this, perhaps with some outside help from 3rd parties. Apple, well maybe less so but still I'd love it if they made a play for it as they always shake things up one way or the other. Google wants to ad mine the planet so they inevitably will try. In the end I have no brand allegiance so I'll buy into whoever makes the most interesting box and walk away from the rest.
