Sony clearly targeted the core market with Move and honestly I thought this was the correct approach rather than marketing to the casual like MS have. However in retrospect, I've realized that when marketing to the market that is likely to already own your system, you aren't really expanding your market.
Odd how I thought Sony's approach, marketing to the core and possibly them spreading the word to the casual, turned out to be the less effective one. Never saw that coming.
What has to be a larger concern for Sony is that while Move itself appears to be selling well, there's a few things that stick out.
Kinect has been the best selling accessory for 2 months in a row. That means that Kinect at 149 USD is outselling Sony's Move despite being significantly more expensive and despite being limited to 1 Kinect per household where dual moves would be popular for some games and certainly for multiplayer.
And, despite selling well, Move has failed to move software as much as Kinect appears to have. I don't think any Move enabled title even make the single SKU top 10 and I'd be surprised if a Move required title made the top 20.
That certainly reinforces me belief from a year ago that whichever accessory targetted non-core gamers would be by far the most successful for Holiday 2010.
Going forward things may change however if Sony can play it's cards right. There's certainly potential long term benefits if they can successfully market a core Move title I think. Something they have failed to do thus far, IMO. As well, it remains to be seen if MS can maintain Kinect momentum. It'll take at least another year before we have a good idea how well either accessory will ultimately end up.
No doubt about it that Kinect cleaned up for Holiday 2010, though.
I'd say MS has sold far more standalone Kinects then bundles. Total X360 sales were ~3 million in these two months in the US, but they've shipped 8 million Kinects, there's a good chance more than 50% of them were sold separately, to existing 360 owners.
No, the key here is that in the eye of the general public, Kinect is new and interesting, an experience unlike anything else, whereas Move is just a Wii re-hash (technical details aside).
I'm personally surprised at how well Kinect did selling to existing users of X360. I, like many others, thought Kinect would be less than attractive to core gamers.
But in hindsight it makes a lot of sense. Families and core gamers with girlfriends would have potential to have non-X360 gamers in their household who would be attracted to it. As well as the whole party attraction with games that might make them more attractive to core gamers (Dance Central for example).
It's too bad we can't see NPD numbers for how many Kinects sold with a breakdown of each SKU.
Regards,
SB
