- Status
Bagel seed
Veteran
Kinectless SKU in March/April in the works. It's definitely some sort of contingency plan in case they need to drop the price quickly to combat PS4 sales.
Rurouni
Veteran
It isn't about Kinectless SKU for lauch window. It's for next year. It might or might not materialized probably based on the X1 launch performance. If MS really wants to sell this SKU next year, they certainly wouldn't tell the existence of this SKU to the public until near the launch date of this SKU.
I think it's far less likely for MS not thinking about Kinectless SKU.
He's claiming a performance drop of 20% this time?
I think that's just the software SDK and not the hardware. If true and I'm reading it right, it wouldn't be surprising and would be something that gets updated over time (better tools, compilers, etc).
I imagine only a major hardware bug that was recently found or dropped clocks would lower the theoretical limit on performance.
GrimThorne
Newcomer
But then anyone could make that claim.
I'm not talking about launch window, that wasn't the earlier rumour either, it too talked about the same timeframe as cboat.
MS shot the rumour down, and there's no really reason to believe they were lying at that point - the whole point of bundling Kinect with every console is to get devs to use it more and not just your standard dance games etc. Optional accessories never get as wide adoption on the dev front. Oh, and MS told devs that Kinect will be on every XB1.
Bagel seed
Veteran
As we've seen over the last few months, both rumors AND official PR can change. But the point is a reliable insider has heard of the possibility of a Kinectless SKU being in the works. And as a contingency plan it makes complete sense.
GrimThorne
Newcomer
I think this stems from people misunderstanding Microsoft's motivations for removing the Kinect hardware requirement. It wasn't done so that it would be discarded. It was done to relax concerns about privacy, and also in the event that the sensor was broken or stopped working. You'd still be able to play games on the X1 without it.
For some reason alot of people have taken the no-hardware requirement as a signal that Microsoft is going to abandon the sensor as a standard function. Without Kinect, the X1 loses it's last unique feature.
Billy Idol
Legend
Kinectless X1 in a year would be a bummer...I don't want to pay for boring kinect...but I can't wait a year for X1.
I point everyone to this announcement on temporary rules, and remind people one more time that discussing sources is presently banned. Either believe CBoat or not, but don't discuss him in this thread (discussing the rumours themselves are of course legitimate discussion). Any posts after this one discussing the source validity will receive a two week ban. If you see this after you have posted such a remark, delete your post before I see it.
edit: removed part of the post, shifty's post wasn't there when I started writing the post
You just include note with the game that it requires Kinect plugged in to work and you can treat it the same way as it would still have to be plugged in even for the console to work, as long as you know every sold XB1 comes with the Kinect.
If it gets broken you no doubt can replace it via warranty or after it runs out via MS or possibly even standard e-tailers and retailers.
Regardless of anything else, I see no reason to believe MS lied when they said there won't be kinectless SKU after the rumors first surfaced
You just include note with the game that it requires Kinect plugged in to work and you can treat it the same way as it would still have to be plugged in even for the console to work, as long as you know every sold XB1 comes with the Kinect.
If it gets broken you no doubt can replace it via warranty or after it runs out via MS or possibly even standard e-tailers and retailers.
Regardless of anything else, I see no reason to believe MS lied when they said there won't be kinectless SKU after the rumors first surfaced
Agreed on your first 2 points, but I can wait. In fact, I HAVE to wait. Even $400 is really pushing it for me. Been a shitty year with all my car & house expenses eating into my disposable income.
Don't want to get a credit card, but I might have to.Anyway, I'm not sure I believe the rumors. Though if MS totally bombs this holiday, they may not have any choice. They should have had backward compatibility. Would have saved them I think.
Tommy McClain
makes no sense at all. magically ms reduced performance 20% with a driver? wtf? pretty sure drivers get better over time, not worse. it also makes zero sense that ms would not livestream because of this, but yet the presentation is going to be offered for download directly after. so ms doesn't want you to see it....but yet they're going to make it available for everybody to see because tape delay will solve everything. right. not to mention ms just talked about their mono/to the metal driver recently. not even to mention are we really suppose to believe they're going to show games with crap awful framerates in the teens and the like? i mean if nothing else they'd just show old footage instead or use the old drivers in the meanwhile. it boggles the mind how dumb this is.
it sounds like typical vague doom and gloom that doesn't mean anything and cant really be proven or disproven and will never amount to anything and nobody will remember in 6 months, or 6 days.
i dont even know what this means. "cross reference the languages". umm, ok, what the hell does that even mean? well first one that comes to mind is russia. yep, that's definitely a different language than the one spoken in the other territories. alrighty then. localization issues confirmed.
the yield issues thing is going to be hilarious if xbox one outsell ps4 that first npd which i have this real funny feeling may just happen (once we have the release dates i feel a poll coming on about this).
ok well wow, sounds great! everything is perfect for sony i'm sure. but hey at least in a couple days we'll see if he was wrong again. i dont really understand the fixation with being two weeks earlier after a 7 year hardware dev cycle as proving you are perfect and the competition is a joke, but ok. i have my doubts anybody is going to launch in oct, but i'd certainly welcome it. it really doesn't matter as both are going to sell every single unit they can make until January at the earliest.
tbh i kind of think launching any earlier than november makes you look weak. it's the same as how i think the halo series lost some cache when bungie started doing september launches.
Edit: I thought about this a little more and I guess I could actually understand a late Oct release as a way to get a little separation. Otherwise more than likely both consoles will be launching within about a week of each other.
But then again I'm not sure "separation" is really something either company cares about, or has any effect on anything logistically, so we're back to square one. Overall if I had to bet I'd still bet Nov for both consoles.
i sort of agree with this but it's more like common sense than anything, i've been posting this ever since they announced kinect can be unplugged, that if sales are poor a kinectless sku would probably happen. certainly not a real rumor as usual it's couched in outs and ifs/ands/buts and whatever happens you cant say he's wrong. sort of like "399 xbox one could happen next year, but then again it might not. I am teh rumorzmaster with all teh inside infoz"
The whole thing is a bit moronic to be honest.
MS was just touting their improved driver performance a couple of weeks ago. As rangers said, plenty of playable boxes on the floor renders this pretty high on the stupid scale, unless cboat means something development related and not game performance related.
If there were really yield issues, ALL of the non-English countries would have been cut. The only market that really matters is the US, as winning there is worth far more than the rest of the world combined. The territories cut won't mean much other than an extra bump in Black Friday restocks.
Kinectless SKU is the stupidest thing that I have heard in this whole fiasco. Of course, given the utter stupidity displayed by MS since E3, this might be true. It seems like when Mattrick left, he took everyone's balls with him.
Last edited by a moderator:
I've heard this a couple times, where are people getting the figure it would be $100 cheaper without Kinect being bundled?
The cost of Kinect is probably in the R&D and chips, which are also in the box itself.
So the BOM for the Kinect itself may not be $100, sure if they released it as a separate product then it would cost more than that, but bundled in, maybe not? What if it only dropped the price by $50?
If they feel the need to release a Kinectless sku, then we're basically talking about a wiiu situation. It would really have to be selling that badly.
Price parity (or even just closer) with PS4 would be nice, but not at the cost of Kinect, as people would question why get an XB1?
Exclusives sure, but if your really interested in exclusives, chances are you'll pick one up anyway at some point.
I don't think many people think it's so much more powerful than the PS4, that games will blow it out of the water, both multi-plats and exclusives.
I've heard this a couple times, where are people getting the figure it would be $100 cheaper without Kinect being bundled?
The cost of Kinect is probably in the R&D and chips, which are also in the box itself.
So the BOM for the Kinect itself may not be $100, sure if they released it as a separate product then it would cost more than that, but bundled in, maybe not? What if it only dropped the price by $50?
If they feel the need to release a Kinectless sku, then we're basically talking about a wiiu situation. It would really have to be selling that badly.
Price parity (or even just closer) with PS4 would be nice, but not at the cost of Kinect, as people would question why get an XB1?
Exclusives sure, but if your really interested in exclusives, chances are you'll pick one up anyway at some point.
I don't think many people think it's so much more powerful than the PS4, that games will blow it out of the water, both multi-plats and exclusives.
i never believed kinect was a huge bom before, until it was said by someone on this board who should know that he heard just the image sensor for kinect 2.0 costs 50 dollars.
given that, the whole kinect adding 100 to the bottom line is quite likely.
it's a lot of tradeoffs involved though, i assume part of the reason for 499 is ms wants to lose little or no money on hardware out of the gate this time. if that attitude changes you could see 399 with kinect. so there's more than one moving part.
i'm against removing kinect, at least until i see it in action and decide if it's worthy.
but if sales show the market doesnt follow your reasoning, kinect may have to go.
- Status
Similar threads
- Sticky