Kinect-less XB1 fallout thread *spawn

[Devious]

I mentioned before in the Halo Xbox One thread that I bought an Xbox One over the PS4 because of Halo. But I'm in the minority on this one. If they announce Halo 2 Anniversary for the Xbox One that might also push some units because in some Halo twitch chats I've read from a lot of people that they are just waiting for the day H2A is announced before they drop money on an XB1. If they also announce H2A with original multiplayer (not Halo 4 with Halo 2 maps) then that would REALLY drive some sales.

 

[(((interference)))]

It's possible to be blunt about this: for a mainline Halo game, Halo 4 wasn't all that well-received. It's the only one with a metacritic below 90, and as far as multiplayer popularity on XBL goes, it speaks for itself:

Be careful. The "7 million PS4" was WW sold-through, and the "5 million XB1" was WW shipped. Those numbers are very much in the PS4's favour, but are neither like-for-like nor for North American in particular.

I'm under the impression that the LTD gap in North America is fairly small in the PS4's favour. Still a huge shift, but not what you're making it out to be.

But this is still early, and continued sales potential is what's important. The next few NPDs should be very interesting.

Oh, sorry, do we have just US figures comparing the two? Was looking at the sales thread for numbers.

EDIT: Have fixed with GAF numbers, difference isn't as marked now but I think the argument still holds.

 

[Rangers]

I mean why exactly would people buy an XB1 over a PS4?
Just to play 'Halo' games (made by a studio who don't seem to know what makes a Halo game)?

Many reasons, again all of which can be argued as far more important than what can be argued as simply "slightly better graphics". I've written this post many times before...

Some of it is just ecosystem, I've written all this before, but I follow a few gamers on twitch.tv. Many of them Gears of War players. They all basically bought Xbox 1's, despite all the headwinds against that, not least an extreme price. Why did they do that? Cause that's the ecosystem they're in, where their friends go as a group, etc.

"Just to play Halo games", it's supposed to be all about the games, isn't it? As for 343, I didn't absolutely love Halo 4, but I liked it better than Halo 3. Mostly because it's simply gorgeous, that counts for so much. Granted, I only play campaigns mostly.

I think MS consoles are a lot more polished. I hear things like 8 hour battery life on DS4, or the thumb-sticks fraying away, and it makes me cringe. Those are basics.

I remember my first experience with PS3. One big problem I had was every time I didn't play for a day or so, the controller would be dead. I didn't have the slightest why. The charge cable is like 2 foot, so it made playing that way an extreme annoyance. Turns out the system (I am pretty sure this was the default setting, although I couldn't say for sure since it was not My PS3) was leaving the controller turned on when the console turned off. What? I had no idea this was even a thing. Of course it took me a few days to really realize what was going on, but it was a real head scratcher. Of course you can go in and change the setting once you realize what's going on, but why the heck would anybody designing a console ever think that was a good idea?

Areas like that are where I think Sony has a ways to go...

Adding to my previous post, it's also important to remember, that at the end of 2010 - around the time PS3 was getting into its stride - the ratio of Xbox 360 and PS3 sales was sitting at 25.4m to 15.4m in the US or 1.65 to 1. For the first five months of this gen (Nov-Mar) the ratio has completely switched to being 7m to 5m, or 1.4 to 1 in favour of PS.

I'm pretty sure that's still the ratio, and by the latest ship figures just in 360 is still selling on par or above PS3 worldwide (800,000 360 shipped last quarter versus 700,000 PS3 most probably). So I'm not sure there was much stride hit except in media and forum circles. Any stride hit imo would have involved PS3 crushing 360 in sales the last 2-3 years. That factually did not happen at all, in fact, it's quite damning PS3 was never likely able to limp past 360 at all, given when each announced 80 million, Sony was 3 weeks behind (which likely equated to a couple million consoles, roughly the same gap for the last 2-3 years)

Oh, sorry, do we have just US figures comparing the two? I was presuming NPD= US only.

It is...

LTD USA sales I have PS4 at 2.913 million, and X1 at 2.527 million.

 

[Rangers]

Spencer said the decision to drop Kinect was made possible when they engineered capability to turn it off...

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2014/...decouple-kinect-from-xbox-one-began-in-april/

“When we made that decision last summer, engineering work had to go into the platform to make sure the box would run without Kinect plugged in, and that was an enabler for this decision,” Spencer said. “It’s been five weeks since I was made head of Xbox, and at that time, Yusuf Medhi and I—we’re running the program together as partners now—and we began spending a lot of time looking at the list of opportunities for us.”

Ironically, all the complaints about Kinect will now enable Xbox to sell quite a few more consoles as they laid the groundwork for the removal of Kinect and the now lower price. In the future it may enable even more if MS starts reclaiming Kinetic power leading the 1080P gap to lessen, and it was a necessary first step to set them up to play hardball on the price one day perhaps, now that Kinect is out as mandatory there are no barriers to the slippery slope. At the very least I'd expect them to eventually explore an even lower priced no disc drive version, which would necessarily come in at $349 at the most.

 

[fehu]

You are all talking as the one is a complete failure instead of a missed opportunity

 

[(((interference)))]

Some of it is just ecosystem, I've written all this before, but I follow a few gamers on twitch.tv. Many of them Gears of War players. They all basically bought Xbox 1's, despite all the headwinds against that, not least an extreme price. Why did they do that? Cause that's the ecosystem they're in, where their friends go as a group, etc.

Ah but if PS4 is outselling XB1 in Xbox heartland this early on, these network effects will come into Sony's favour.

I mean all the hardcore Gears of War, Halo, COD players who gamed on their 360s last gen (and likely aren't going to baulk at shelling out $500) would have surely been enough to give XB1 even a small lead in the US (especially with the PS4 supply constrained initially).

Unless, of course, there has been a strong shift in core gamer sentiment away from MS (which certainly seems to be the case going by the online fora).

"Just to play Halo games", it's supposed to be all about the games, isn't it? As for 343, I didn't absolutely love Halo 4, but I liked it better than Halo 3. Mostly because it's simply gorgeous, that counts for so much. Granted, I only play campaigns mostly.

The point is, that even Halo, which has long been a lynchpin of MS's console strategy is not what it once was, as compared to say last gen and the launch of the XB360.

I think MS consoles are a lot more polished. I hear things like 8 hour battery life on DS4, or the thumb-sticks fraying away, and it makes me cringe. Those are basics.

Hmm, debatable, XB1 launched without even a battery indicator for the controller... I think both machines were rushed out the door.

I'm pretty sure that's still the ratio, and by the latest ship figures just in 360 is still selling on par or above PS3 worldwide (800,000 360 shipped last quarter versus 700,000 PS3 most probably). So I'm not sure there was much stride hit except in media and forum circles. Any stride hit imo would have involved PS3 crushing 360 in sales the last 2-3 years. That factually did not happen at all, in fact, it's quite damning PS3 was never likely able to limp past 360 at all, given when each announced 80 million, Sony was 3 weeks behind (which likely equated to a couple million consoles, roughly the same gap for the last 2-3 years)

I took out that bit about hitting its stride as it was tangential to the argument and clearly distracted from it.

And by 'hitting its stride', I meant that it started to narrow the gap with the 360, multiplats performed better and the exclusives really started to shine (eg. GT5, Uncharted 2, God of War 3, Killzone 2, Heavy Rain), not that it was beating the 360.

 

[Brad Grenz]

Thank god for the NSA scandal that gave MS the foresight to engineer a solution to their original no-Kinect-self-bricking design.

 

[(((interference)))]

You are all talking as the one is a complete failure instead of a missed opportunity

Make no mistake, it is only a question of the relative successes of the two consoles.

No, one is saying the XB1 is a failure - that's the Wii U, but is it a missed opportunity? you betcha.

...

You know, I was reliably informed, that originally their plan was for XB1 to launch with Kinect for $399.
Now that would have been interesting...

 

[Shifty Geezer]

The SOC's are almost the same size, and I'm of the opinion GDDR5 is a LOT more expensive than DDR3.

PS4 SOC is measured by chipworks at 348MM^2, whereas MS gave an official X1 SOC size of 363mm^2.

My bad! Internals cost difference may come down to all the extras then rather than the main components.

 

[zed]

http://www.geekwire.com/2013/microsoft-partners-nfl/
I've been saying this a while
Who thought it was a good idea spending 500 million for this American football dead instead of investing in say 5 games the size of titanfall or a lot more smaller budgeted but exclusive games.
Ppl say why buy the xbone instead of the ps4 at the same price? Well if it's the only way for ppl to play the game they want then that's good enuf reason to buy the machine. Us400$ ain't that expensive to a lot of people

 

[Prophecy2k]

Well that killed Kinect.

Kinect killed Kinect(2).

The 360 version released and sold well at first, but then everyone realised how limited the device was, not only technologically but also in concept, and its software development dried up. Kinect 2 software development never really got started, and MS were incredibly foolish for thinking they could flog their next-gen console based around a device they already launched, which already saw its popularity bubble inflate and burst in a considerably and impressively short space of time.

Kinect was a lost cause and a dead weight on XB1 since well be fore the console launched. MS should have either looked for a new technology to push as the USP for XB1, or should have waited on the first Kinect and launched it along the XB1 as its fresh new thing. All the useful, gaming related applications for kinect didn't really need to be done with Kinect, e.g. voice commands etc which are purely software and could just as easily have been coded into the OS to use with a headset or cheap webcam.

The first Kinect was novel, the second was redundant, and MS were too short sighted to recognise that when their eys were blinded by $ signs seeing all the ad money they could make through bundling the device.

I'm glad they aborted Kinect, now before things got catastrophic for XB1. However I still wonder whether its still too litle too late to rectify the damage they've done to their Xbox business by archetecting an entire core gaming console around a device that no core gamer even wanted in the first place.

 

[xexuxjy]

Definitely agree. Think the technology behind Kinect is really interesting and it's good to see report after report of clever things being done with it. Unfortunately all those reports are in non gaming fields and as a gaming technology it really hasn't worked. My 7 year old son loves it for happy action theatre , but anything more than that has just been painful. The increase in resolution and scanning technology in the kinect 2 really hasn't altered the fundamental issues with games....

 

[Shifty Geezer]

TBH it's probably more worth Sony buying the tech for use in its medical industries!

 

[blakjedi]

The problem with xb1 isn't and never was the Kinect. If you ever used it you would realize that it just isn't. Kinect works. And with a little patience works better than ever. The Kinect as a usp for the xb1 is simply the whipping boy of those who never used for it.

In reality the problem with xb1 is simply the strength of the GPU and/or the quality of the tools available to developers to make it sing. If the xb1 had an on par gpu so fanboys would not be able to run to digital foundry for validation of their console choice every week and gloat, sales would have stabilized at an acceptable rate and the Kinect would have stayed. If you were getting 1080p on average games at 60fps or even 30 fps on average... Kinect would have stayed.

Kinect was removed mot because the technology wasn't worthwhile but because of sales pressure on the console. That's really all this is.

 

[xexuxjy]

It may work better than ever , but they're still never really shown any games that make it worthwhile.... it's fallen down at every stage when people have tried to make interesting games with it. The gpu/tools I really don't think is the issue as while they're not as good , they're not so far behind that they can't be used to make impressive games. It will be interesting to see what all parties bring to e3.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

The problem with xb1 isn't and never was the Kinect. If you ever used it you would realize that it just isn't. Kinect works. And with a little patience works better than ever. The Kinect as a usp for the xb1 is simply the whipping boy of those who never used for it.

I think you're only partly right. If the hardware wasn't less powerful, it'd be more competitive for the core gamers. However, it'd also have cost more. The problem with Kinect is no-one's shown great use of it save for voice input and a couple of motion games. The potential as a wide-audience device (exercise, education, etc.) is IMO phenomenal, but MS ditched that audience to chase after the established core gamer audience, perhaps as the only demographic they were hearing from and who would support a console (how many educational companies would start making Kinect-driving learning aids?), and in the core gamer market, Kinect didn't have any decent backing. So Kinect as an idea, at least as MS realised it, was flawed and dragged the console, as a simple games machine for the core gamer, down. As a lifestyle box, it had great potential which MS never backed.

 

[Billy Idol]

http://www.geekwire.com/2013/microsoft-partners-nfl/
I've been saying this a while
Who thought it was a good idea spending 500 million for this American football dead instead of investing in say 5 games the size of titanfall or a lot more smaller budgeted but exclusive games.
Ppl say why buy the xbone instead of the ps4 at the same price? Well if it's the only way for ppl to play the game they want then that's good enuf reason to buy the machine. Us400$ ain't that expensive to a lot of people

Completely agree. Why in hell didn't they spend money on more exclusives?? Who cars for 1080p if the best games are exclusive to your console!

Also, why in hell didn't they spend money to make a game for kinect...and I don't mean this ultra shitty kinect sports bla bla or whatever...a real AAA kinect game everyone wants.

It really shows that most success in electronic industry is down to chance and not having a smart plan...MS doesn't know why X360 was so successful and how they managed to equal the giant that is playstation...they just were lucky last gen...it is about games, nothing more, nothing less.

 

[xexuxjy]

I think they have tried to make AAA kinect games, but ultimately failed and fallen back on standard sports games.... I think that should have rung some warning bells with them a while back. Wasn't Ryse originally pushed as a kinect only game on the 360 that then went awfully quiet (admittedly it probably had a very different form then to now).

ho hum.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Completely agree. Why in hell didn't they spend money on more exclusives?? Who cars for 1080p if the best games are exclusive to your console!

You can also add the new TV exclusive content as where MS are spending their money.

 

[BoardBonobo]

Now all Sony needs to do is announce a $50 price cut on the PS4 and include the PS Camera with every box. That would be the ultimate slap in the face to come from E3.