You have to keep in mind that it doesn't matter is the One is the "2nd fastest selling console of all time" or that we, people on the internet, think its selling well enough. The only comparison that Microsoft cares about is how its selling compared to internal projections and how they will explain that to shareholders. I could be the greatest console of all time and sell 10 million units, but if they projected it to sell 12 million? Heads will roll, and changes will be made.
Let's face it, for all this talk about innovation, and what gamers want, and how well/badly the One is selling at this point and any number of other factors, the true fact of the matter is that Microsoft just plain decided they could make more money without Kinect than with it. This is a business, after all.
Switch: 3947-4890-9293
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Irond WillWARNING: NO HURTFUL COMMENTS, PLEASE!!!!!Cambridge. MAModeratormod
And they aren't removing the kinect. You can still buy it, they're just recognising they're being outsold. I would be shocked if they made the decision based on ign commenters, rather than the far more likely reality that their own research, projections, and management, showed that the kinect wasn't boosting sales, and was acting as a wall to lower budget buyers desperately needed to broaden the One's install base.
Being the weaker console never hurt 360. And the uk example is one small example over a small period of time. This decision is likely made with long term projections in mind.
Ostensibly although Microsoft might say things like "we're responding to customer feedback", the far more likely reason is that the kinect appeal has shrunk in the wake of tablet and mobile gaming, and that there isn't any indication it will grow enough that people will buy consoles for kinect games. Ie, the kind of people the kinect was meant to attract aren't being attracted, so there's no point in sticking to selling it as mandatory. Instead it will remain a niche secondary peripheral, which it really always has been game-wise, regardless of what MS touted it as
Nothing has really changed outside of Microsoft seeing the kinect the way we all see it, as a secondary peripheral. It's still available, it's still going to get the occasional game, it's not like they've discontinued support. They are just positioning it in a realistic way.
upper management both in microsoft and in the games division has shifted several times since the original decision to include the kinect as an integral component. the kinect was very much a "console vision" sort of decision (no pun intended), and it's likely that whoever developed the vision is now no longer in a position to be insisting on it.
i continue to think it's a mistake for MS to have chipped their key differentiators away (digital distro, always online, kinect) to the point where they're now competing with the PS4 on last-gen footing. there is obviously a vocal cadre of core gamers who wanted the xbone to be a 360 with updated gfx chip and nothing more, but i personally was excited to see some innovation and differentiation between the consoles.
it seems to me that the ps4 already offered exactly what this cadre wanted (with more gigaflops or whatever, plus japanese exclusives) and it doesn't seem like the xbone is particularly suited to competing on those particular terms. it strikes me as a mistake, but more importantly to me, it's a disappointing abandonment of an interesting vision.
fwiw, and maybe this is because there is such a launch games drought, my household gets much more use out of the xbone's media capabilities (using kinect!) than i get use out of it as a games machine. frankie loves the kinect. hopefully their new sku offering won't mean a literal abandonment of kinect refinements or development (though i fear the worst).
Yes. Once the Xbox One and Xbox 360 system updates become available in June, Xbox Live Gold members who purchased a paid membership before that day can cancel and receive a pro-rata refund of any unused remaining days between the date of cancellation and the date their paid Gold membership ends. Cancellation and pro-rata refund requests must be made by August 31, 2014 and require six to eight weeks for processing. Free or trial Gold memberships are not eligible for a refund. To request your pro-rata refund, please click http://support.xbox.com/contact-us after the system updates become available in June.
Third party developers weren't going to use Kinect in any sort of useful way beyond voice commands anyway. So it's really up to Microsoft to show why we need to spend the $100 for their camera. And up until now there was no reason (in a gaming application). If they push it hard in the next year or so and make some games that utilize it then people will buy it. Forcing it upon everyone didn't get the results they were hoping for, obviously.
I have to point out that $100 isn't a universally significant sum or barrier for purchase. I know nobody wants to be that guy to mention that to people who had problems with the console being expensive, but it's not an all-sweeping truism.
That said, you're right. It was hard to provide incentive for TPDs to do more with the kinect on non-exclusive titles before. There's literally no point for them to bother now that there's a SKU w/o the kinect.
For parents trying to decide between two consoles to purchase for Timmy? I'm willing to bet $100 is a large sum of money for them to drop on it.
The average console gamer is now in their late 20s to mid 30s. I don't think this anecdote is nearly as useful as it used to be. Damn near 70% of the console-owning pie is over 18 now.
However, this doesn't give an indication as to the average income of this, making Syndalis' point a rather non-sequiter because it doesn't support his argument anyway. Being over 18 does not correlate with "$100 suddenly doesn't matter". I'm 31 and it makes a big fucking difference to me, especially when it's on something I neither want to use or think it is worth while.
Evidently from the sales numbers, a lot more people agree with me than Microsoft would have liked and hence this move.
Holy fuck, the average is 35? That doesn't seem right.
I'd rather see the Median age.
fake edit: Actually 35 is about right. Those are parents buying games for their kids.
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AegeriTiny wee bacteriumsPlateau of LengRegistered Userregular
edited May 2014
I am honestly continually baffled how ill-thought out draconian DRM, a nebulous "sharing" service that publishers would have mass revolted on and a device that barely functions to play games (outside of Dance Central) is actually "innovation".
Well, unless you're the CEO of Bastards Incorporated, where the specialty is screwing over consumers, I guess.
the problem with having Bold Visions is that some people aren't going to want the same things you do. In fact, they may actively not want what you think they should. And unless you are in a position of such power that you can literally force them to accept your concept of the future, despite it giving them no perceived added value, you are not going to be successful.
"I want X+1."
"Here you go. There's X+1+a+b+g."
"... but I don't want a, b OR g."
"Sure you do."
"No, I really don't."
"We think you should have them. Someday everyone will have a, b and g and it will be awesome."
"Can't I just have X+1?"
"Nope! Package deal, all or nothing."
"Psst. Hey. We're selling Y+1 for cheaper."
"Eh, close enough."
"Wait! Come back! I haven't finished telling you why you're wrong to think you don't want a, b and g! Damnit, don't you see? We know better than you do!"
apple's been extraordinarily successful with their bold-vision-oriented approach. when you couldn't buy an iphone with a physical keyboard people went berserk but they held the line and now you basically can't find a phone with a physical keyboard.
MS looked like they were striking out in this direction with win 8 and win mobile and xbone, but are now backpedaling furiously to their more comfortable stance.
I am honestly continually baffled how ill-thought out draconian DRM and a device that barely functions to play games (outside of Dance Central) is actually "innovation".
Well, unless you're the CEO of Bastards Incorporated I guess.
The last few years Microsoft pretty much ignored what actual consumers wanted and rammed ahead whatever sounded great to the suits, thinking the world would bend to their will. See also: Windows 8.
But Irond Will is right, there's new management and they're working on trying to give people what they want. They've made it so that PC users can pretty much ignore the much-hyped tile screen in Windows 8, after all. In that light dropping Kinect is pretty much in the same line of thinking.
Well the XB1 isn't the only system with E3 announcements. They also have the press releases of " >insert game< runs at 1080p and 60fps on the PS4!" working against them to.
Which is also why they dumped the kinect, because all the stuff reserved for it can now go into the games to give them that boost so news reports are ">insert game< runs at 1080p and 60fps on both consoles".
They have absolutely everything to gain from dumping the kinect and very little downside.
I doubt the performance gains will be that significant.
What a day for the kinectless One to come out, my afternoon was a fucking nightmare.
Excitedly headed home after work to hook my new xbox up, after waiting for the stupid thing to be delivered for 14 days I had high expectations. Moved things around AV wise, set everything up, console boots up great, I even remember at the time being very impressed at how easy the setup was. The thing did a giant firmware update then went through the first steps with me, I set up the kinect and marvelled at how great the video quality was and was excited to be able to skype with my parents and show off the new baby in a couple months. I started poking around the UI and saw the 'update controller' section and remembered that hey, I should do that!
When controller firmware update had finished and I dumped back into the main OS I think to myself "huh, that's a weird box up there, what does that say? Kinect discconnected? Boy that is weird?"
After an hour of trying every single workaround ever printed for this issue, and it seems to be pretty widespread based on some googling, and yup, my fucking Kinect suffered some sort of major power loss and died about 15 minutes after being turned on. GREAT FIRST TIME EXPERIENCE! Next I got to enjoy the fun of trying to contact Xbox Support!
Turns out that MS won't send the replacement to you first through their web form so easy enough, I'll just do a web chat instead. After going through everything with the web chat guy "oh sorry, through this interface we can't do what you want, you need to call in if you want a replacement sent to you first". Go to call in, 30 minute wait printed on website, where it offers to setup a callback instead, try to do that and the website errors out and starts giving me xbox.com errors. Try it again no go. Phone instead, 10 minutes into the wait, boom disconnected. Phone again, somehow this time I get into a queue where it offers to call me back 34 - 52 minutes later when the next available operator is free, so I do that. 40 minutes later my phone rings, I pick it up aaaaaand instead of talking to a person I'm then put on hold for the next 30 or so minutes.
Eventually I finally talk to a guy and we set up a replacement service, he says he's never heard/seen this issue before and it can't be very common (I have my doubts), explains the RMA process to me, it's nice and under warranty, they'll send one out to me within 48 hours and then I just send it back a week later when it arrives in the same box, easy peasy!!! And then he asks me for my credit card info so that I can pay for shipping.
Let's just say asking me to pay for a shipping on a RMA on a product that was DOA did not go over very well.
Anyways what a fucking cluster fuck, I got too many shades of dealing with 360 hardware supports over the past 8 years and this is not a good thing. I played a little bit of Forza but was just kinda bummed out about the whole thing and eventually just watched Game of Thrones with my wife. So yay first time Xbox One experience, all you guys buying the kinectless version I guess are making the right call
woke up to an e-mail that said my replacement kinect should ship "soon"
I think I have a few hats to boil up. I rather loudly never expected them to throw Kinect to the side like this.
Wise to get this news out of the way before E3, as it's not really something you want to get applause for.
You know, I am now disappointed they didn't do it at their conference.
Would they have got boos or applause from the audience? I think it might have been more mixed than you think.
Probably true, though mixed booing and applause probably isn't the tone you want either. Hopefully this is MS deciding their backs are against the wall and it's time to put up a fight that's not based on keeping the course and buying exclusivity.
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Irond WillWARNING: NO HURTFUL COMMENTS, PLEASE!!!!!Cambridge. MAModeratormod
I am honestly continually baffled how ill-thought out draconian DRM, a nebulous "sharing" service that publishers would have mass revolted on and a device that barely functions to play games (outside of Dance Central) is actually "innovation".
Well, unless you're the CEO of Bastards Incorporated, where the specialty is screwing over consumers, I guess.
pure digital distro offers advantages and a streamlined supply chain. it cuts out resellers and focuses revenue at the developer and publisher. it's a great innovation. but it obviously requires some form of drm different from the drm they load into discs.
and we don't know what sorts of gameplay innovations might have come out of a guaranteed kinect. it's a really interesting and powerful piece of technology, and it's just churlish to insist that, because you weren't personally awed by either of the launch titles (outside of Dance Central) it is therefore "barely functional".
it's a shame to the development of gaming in general that MS is sloughing off its differentiators. the xbone was developed around those, and if they fully strip them away all that's left is a ps4 with a better UI and less gigahertz.
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HardtargetThere Are Four LightsVancouverRegistered Userregular
I am honestly continually baffled how ill-thought out draconian DRM, a nebulous "sharing" service that publishers would have mass revolted on and a device that barely functions to play games (outside of Dance Central) is actually "innovation".
Well, unless you're the CEO of Bastards Incorporated, where the specialty is screwing over consumers, I guess.
How is a all digital future where you can buy a game from anywhere tie it to your account and be able to use it from any xbox in the entire world with no issues at all draconian? Steam is the greatest thing to ever hit the PC in my opinion and the original xbox vision was more relaxed than steam is.
The biggest shame about all of this is not that the kinect is going to be less supported now (which is a stupid choice) but it's the full on giving up of the digital ideas that Microsoft was pushing a year ago, they were smart and new and would have been so much less hassle, and they could have been refined to please more people (ie 3 or 7 or 30 day check-ins instead of daily, etc)
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HardtargetThere Are Four LightsVancouverRegistered Userregular
Man, $100 is a game and a controller, so yes, $100 is a big difference in price.
$120+tax is what you meant to say
Also hilarious news: in Canada it's now official that the kinectless xbox one cost $399, which means that the Xbox One is now CHEAPER than the PS4 in this country, which costs $450. So that is damn interesting.
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AegeriTiny wee bacteriumsPlateau of LengRegistered Userregular
and we don't know what sorts of gameplay innovations might have come out of a guaranteed kinect. it's a really interesting and powerful piece of technology, and it's just churlish to insist that, because you weren't personally awed by either of the launch titles (outside of Dance Central) it is therefore "barely functional".
You can say "You don't know what it could have done!" and I can say "Here is what it did do".
Which is carry on a tradition of 4 years of barely functional, frustrating and entirely bafflingly badly designed games. It's actually been pointed out earlier in the thread and was a good point that was missed, but Microsoft needed to sell the Kinect with a very strong title straight up. That they didn't was a massive problem and why they have been forced into this position. They never provided any evidence that the Kinect was a worthwhile device, either at the launch of the Xbone (the two main games they have released for it), or over the past four years.
And again, people have tried to make innovative games using the Kinect and the most frequent result was "Why couldn't we do this with a controller just more accurately?". I don't mention Dance Central as a success to degrade it, because it's a fantastic game but it is in fact one of the few genuine examples of the Kinect doing what it should. Is a device that is good for a narrow range of games, notably "Dance Genre" worth imposing $100?
I am honestly continually baffled how ill-thought out draconian DRM, a nebulous "sharing" service that publishers would have mass revolted on and a device that barely functions to play games (outside of Dance Central) is actually "innovation".
Well, unless you're the CEO of Bastards Incorporated, where the specialty is screwing over consumers, I guess.
How is a all digital future where you can buy a game from anywhere tie it to your account and be able to use it from any xbox in the entire world with no issues at all draconian?
You neglected the part where if you lost internet access you couldn't play your games anymore after 24 hours until you reconnected.
You also missed the part where the console and account were region locked, so you actually COULDN'T access your games "Anywhere in the world without issues", because you wouldn't be able to play on the account outside of the country the account was made in (so a US account would not work in Australia).
I mean, it's not Draconian if you don't acknowledge what it actually did.
Third party developers weren't going to use Kinect in any sort of useful way beyond voice commands anyway. So it's really up to Microsoft to show why we need to spend the $100 for their camera. And up until now there was no reason (in a gaming application). If they push it hard in the next year or so and make some games that utilize it then people will buy it. Forcing it upon everyone didn't get the results they were hoping for, obviously.
I have to point out that $100 isn't a universally significant sum or barrier for purchase. I know nobody wants to be that guy to mention that to people who had problems with the console being expensive, but it's not an all-sweeping truism.
That said, you're right. It was hard to provide incentive for TPDs to do more with the kinect on non-exclusive titles before. There's literally no point for them to bother now that there's a SKU w/o the kinect.
For parents trying to decide between two consoles to purchase for Timmy? I'm willing to bet $100 is a large sum of money for them to drop on it.
Also along with the average age of players going up, the kind of parents you're talking about here, that are ignorant of gaming at large and don't have any interest in it, they don't buy consoles anymore.
They buy apps on devices that they already were going to own anyway for their kids to play with.
This is one of the reasons that the Wii U is such a failure. Back when the Wii was new, this group of people would still be buying 'whatever video game thing' for their kids, now there's no need to waste all that money on 'games' because the appstore has 'games' for .99 cents.
Parents that buy consoles now, are mostly getting them for older kids that know exactly what they want, or they are buying them for their use as well because they also play games.
I am honestly continually baffled how ill-thought out draconian DRM, a nebulous "sharing" service that publishers would have mass revolted on and a device that barely functions to play games (outside of Dance Central) is actually "innovation".
Well, unless you're the CEO of Bastards Incorporated, where the specialty is screwing over consumers, I guess.
How is a all digital future where you can buy a game from anywhere tie it to your account and be able to use it from any xbox in the entire world with no issues at all draconian? Steam is the greatest thing to ever hit the PC in my opinion and the original xbox vision was more relaxed than steam is.
The biggest shame about all of this is not that the kinect is going to be less supported now (which is a stupid choice) but it's the full on giving up of the digital ideas that Microsoft was pushing a year ago, they were smart and new and would have been so much less hassle, and they could have been refined to please more people (ie 3 or 7 or 30 day check-ins instead of daily, etc)
Steam IS awesome. The problem is that my Steam account works on every PC I will build from now until the future. Also games I bought that are 10+ years old still work just fine on my current rig. Could Microsoft guarantee that all past and future games work on a digital-only console? What happens with XBox One Two comes out? Will all those games work or will I have to deal with keeping it around if I want to play those games again.
It isn't just that there was six months of nothing. It is that there was six months of nothing plus little announced that might be something other than crap. There was what, Fantasia and maybe the next Dance Central?
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dresdenphileWatch out for snakes!Registered Userregular
Yes. Once the Xbox One and Xbox 360 system updates become available in June, Xbox Live Gold members who purchased a paid membership before that day can cancel and receive a pro-rata refund of any unused remaining days between the date of cancellation and the date their paid Gold membership ends. Cancellation and pro-rata refund requests must be made by August 31, 2014 and require six to eight weeks for processing. Free or trial Gold memberships are not eligible for a refund. To request your pro-rata refund, please click http://support.xbox.com/contact-us after the system updates become available in June.
It says "refund"; I wonder if that's actual, factual money, or Microsoft Funbucks? I expect the latter, but hope for the former.
dresdenphile on
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HardtargetThere Are Four LightsVancouverRegistered Userregular
I am honestly continually baffled how ill-thought out draconian DRM, a nebulous "sharing" service that publishers would have mass revolted on and a device that barely functions to play games (outside of Dance Central) is actually "innovation".
Well, unless you're the CEO of Bastards Incorporated, where the specialty is screwing over consumers, I guess.
How is a all digital future where you can buy a game from anywhere tie it to your account and be able to use it from any xbox in the entire world with no issues at all draconian?
You neglected the part where if you lost internet access you couldn't play your games anymore after 24 hours until you reconnected.
You also missed the part where the console and account were region locked, so you actually COULDN'T access your games "Anywhere in the world without issues", because you wouldn't be able to play on the account outside of the country the account was made in (so a US account would not work in Australia).
I mean, it's not Draconian if you don't acknowledge what it actually did.
Except I literally said "and they could have been refined to please more people (ie 3 or 7 or 30 day check-ins instead of daily, etc)" which you cut out of my post. There is no way some of those restrictions would have survived to shipping.
They needed to refine the idea, not just abandon it wholesale. Such a mistake.
That leads to something that's always baffled me -- why didn't Microsoft make a game that truly showed off something awesome and new that could only be done with Kinect?
Say what you will about the Wii's motion controls, but they introduced it with Wii Sports, which turned out to be the ultimate killer app for casuals. It worked well, it was accessible, it was new.
But within Microsoft, the closest thing they created themselves to show off Kinect was -- Wii Sports. Or their version, at least. The best Kinect games were made outside Microsoft, and without direction from Microsoft. I remember reading how Harmonix struggled to come up with a way to surf the menus in Dance Central, before eventually creating that neat "slide to select" thing. And The Gunstringer was created based on a truly epic bit of bullshitting they managed to turn into a fun game.
Why couldn't the people who came up with this intriguing technology actually sit down and show other developers how it's done with a great showcase for that technology? Maybe that's part of the reason most Kinect games were the same kind of thing the Wii got.
Nah, there's just blood in the water, which has worked some people into a frenzy. Again. ironically the tone of these threads seems like it's come full circle into the state it was last year.
“I used to draw, hard to admit that I used to draw...”
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AegeriTiny wee bacteriumsPlateau of LengRegistered Userregular
I am honestly continually baffled how ill-thought out draconian DRM, a nebulous "sharing" service that publishers would have mass revolted on and a device that barely functions to play games (outside of Dance Central) is actually "innovation".
Well, unless you're the CEO of Bastards Incorporated, where the specialty is screwing over consumers, I guess.
How is a all digital future where you can buy a game from anywhere tie it to your account and be able to use it from any xbox in the entire world with no issues at all draconian?
You neglected the part where if you lost internet access you couldn't play your games anymore after 24 hours until you reconnected.
You also missed the part where the console and account were region locked, so you actually COULDN'T access your games "Anywhere in the world without issues", because you wouldn't be able to play on the account outside of the country the account was made in (so a US account would not work in Australia).
I mean, it's not Draconian if you don't acknowledge what it actually did.
Except I literally said "and they could have been refined to please more people (ie 3 or 7 or 30 day check-ins instead of daily, etc)" which you cut out of my post. There is no way some of those restrictions would have survived to shipping.
Well those restrictions didn't survive to shipping, that was the point of the backlash. But the point is, that if you want to sugarcoat what the DRM was that's your prerogative: But it doesn't change that you can't go all revisionist history on what they did do. The DRM was draconian and you might want to pretend those restrictions weren't a part of it but they were. Your post implies that it was a check in and oh wow, the DRM wasn't so bad! However, that is absolutely 100% false and you can easily find people who travel (military), those who wanted to import in Europe for example (Someone from Poland could not import an Xbone and have it work on a Polish account or IP, because the DRM prevented that. This was notably ironic because they had CD Projekt up on stage at their conference) or similar complaining about that decision.
Your "ideal" DRM that's not so bad is irrelevant to what they actually did do and that is what my post is referring to.
It isn't just that there was six months of nothing. It is that there was six months of nothing plus little announced that might be something other than crap. There was what, Fantasia and maybe the next Dance Central?
Fantasia got a lot of praise at E3, but has rather dropped off the radar now. I think Microsoft were hoping it would be that killer app that would convince people.
Actually, I really do admit I feel terrible for Harmonix. They're the only company who did consistently good things with the kinect and they've been pretty screwed by this.
HardtargetThere Are Four LightsVancouverRegistered Userregular
The thing about that is, I don't really care if the military can't pay their Xbox Ones. I guess that makes me a bad person but I'd rather a system that was awesome for most people and sucked for a small group that slowly got better over time than a system that just sucks for everybody and doesn't raise the base at all for consoles.
Sadly my bundle copy of Forza 5 came on a disc and because of the policy changes this is no longer a digital game with retail distribution but a old fashioned retail game with no benefits of convenience to me. I want to never have to use the disc ever and now I'm locked into it with no way of turning it into the digital game that was originally promised and that sucks.
Kinnect is freaking great for a small subset of game types. But without buttons, it's pretty much impossible to create a motion controlled game that isn't on rails. Buttons allow you to handle movement and side actions while you use motion controls for your main method of interaction/attack. Motion controls are fantastic in games like Skyward Sword, Infamous 2, Resident Evil 4, and the like and they're not rail shooters.
and we don't know what sorts of gameplay innovations might have come out of a guaranteed kinect. it's a really interesting and powerful piece of technology, and it's just churlish to insist that, because you weren't personally awed by either of the launch titles (outside of Dance Central) it is therefore "barely functional".
You can say "You don't know what it could have done!" and I can say "Here is what it did do".
Which is carry on a tradition of 4 years of barely functional, frustrating and entirely bafflingly badly designed games. It's actually been pointed out earlier in the thread and was a good point that was missed, but Microsoft needed to sell the Kinect with a very strong title straight up. That they didn't was a massive problem and why they have been forced into this position. They never provided any evidence that the Kinect was a worthwhile device, either at the launch of the Xbone (the two main games they have released for it), or over the past four years.
And again, people have tried to make innovative games using the Kinect and the most frequent result was "Why couldn't we do this with a controller just more accurately?". I don't mention Dance Central as a success to degrade it, because it's a fantastic game but it is in fact one of the few genuine examples of the Kinect doing what it should. Is a device that is good for a narrow range of games, notably "Dance Genre" worth imposing $100?
The answer is clearly no.
the kinect 2 is a far more functional device than the kinect 1 - assuming that all kinect 2 games would be constrained as and play just like kinect 1 games is as wrong as assuming NES games were doomed to be carbon copies of atari 2600 games.
also it is no surprise at all that the first-ever motion-controlled fighting game is going to have issues. fighting games with sticks and gamepads took literal decades to get where they are now, control-wise.
and who knows? maybe motion control really is always going to be terrible for video gaming and we'll never find any decent synergies outside of a dance title. i'm skeptical of this assertion though, especially given the immaturity of the field. there's a chicken-and-egg problem here - it's not profitable to develop to the kinect if no one owns one yet, and it's not profitable to sell the kinect if there aren't many great titles for it. these things take time, and MS was trying to bite the bullet and get things rolling.
i mean - you know what else is dreadful? every single application developed for the oculus rift. they're fucking awful! and probably will continue to be so for a real long time. this doesn't necessarily mean that VR is a dead-end technology though.
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syndalisGetting ClassyOn the WallRegistered User, Loves Apple Productsregular
Kinnect is freaking great for a small subset of game types. But without buttons, it's pretty much impossible to create a motion controlled game that isn't on rails. Buttons allow you to handle movement and side actions while you use motion controls for your main method of interaction/attack. Motion controls are fantastic in games like Skyward Sword, Infamous 2, Resident Evil 4, and the like and they're not rail shooters.
And voice commands can be done with a headset.
And its a good thing the modern kinect totally allows you to build games that use both the camera and your controller at the same time.
This complaint sits better with the kinect 1, where that was a valid complaint and a rather dumb policy on MS's part.
SW-4158-3990-6116
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
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AegeriTiny wee bacteriumsPlateau of LengRegistered Userregular
i mean - you know what else is dreadful? every single application developed for the oculus rift. they're fucking awful! and probably will continue to be so for a real long time. this doesn't necessarily mean that VR is a dead-end technology though.
Sadly, I get migraines that are so debilitating they almost render me blind out of pain from the use of 3D and sadly VR technology as well (it's a genetic thing), but what I have seen out of an OR after trying one is infinitely, I mean infinitely, more compelling than anything I have seen out of Kinect in the ~5 years its been around. This is a device that caused me literal pain and yet I wanted to use it more the experience was so compellingly novel.
As for the rest of your post, it's all assumptions and hypothetical "But what if they really DID make a Kinect game that wasn't awful?!", while ignoring the gigantic elephant in the room of yet more completely awful or barely functional kinect games tradition being boldly carried on. It also seems that nobody seems to really know how to go about this or how to answer a simple "How does this make a better experience than a controller?" question.
Why couldn't the people who came up with this intriguing technology actually sit down and show other developers how it's done with a great showcase for that technology? Maybe that's part of the reason most Kinect games were the same kind of thing the Wii got.
i think they tried. i mean they got harmonix to develop fantasia and clearly tried to get lionhead to produce something - but of course molyneux is a chronic overpromiser and underdeliverer. there's another dance central on the way, of course.
but really it's an identical question as "why didn't either console have amazing launch titles?" it's hard and expensive to develop AAA games and not everything succeeds with the additional twist that reliable, advanced motion-control for games is a new technology and relatively fallow ground.
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AegeriTiny wee bacteriumsPlateau of LengRegistered Userregular
Molyneux is no longer with Lionhead and hasn't been for a while. Are you thinking of Fable the Journey? He left the company after that and so would have zero involvement in any Lionhead made current Kinect game.
I am honestly continually baffled how ill-thought out draconian DRM and a device that barely functions to play games (outside of Dance Central) is actually "innovation".
Well, unless you're the CEO of Bastards Incorporated I guess.
The last few years Microsoft pretty much ignored what actual consumers wanted and rammed ahead whatever sounded great to the suits, thinking the world would bend to their will. See also: Windows 8.
But Irond Will is right, there's new management and they're working on trying to give people what they want. They've made it so that PC users can pretty much ignore the much-hyped tile screen in Windows 8, after all. In that light dropping Kinect is pretty much in the same line of thinking.
No, consumers are just fucking terrified of change
The Win8 interface is not confusing for more than ten minutes and no one but septuagenarians actually used the start menu to navigate to anything anyway, it was a cluttered shitty mess from its inception
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Irond WillWARNING: NO HURTFUL COMMENTS, PLEASE!!!!!Cambridge. MAModeratormod
Molyneux is no longer with Lionhead and hasn't been for a while. Are you thinking of Fable the Journey? He left the company after that and so would have zero involvement in any Lionhead made current Kinect game.
I think it was called project milo? that was intended for the kinect, then the kinect 2 but nothing really came of it.
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AegeriTiny wee bacteriumsPlateau of LengRegistered Userregular
I actually like Windows 8 in many ways now I'm used to it. Though I don't know what it was like pre 8.1 or whatever, but I like it. I bought my new computer dreading Windows 8 as the OS equivalent of Hitler, so I was pleasantly surprised.
Kinnect is freaking great for a small subset of game types. But without buttons, it's pretty much impossible to create a motion controlled game that isn't on rails. Buttons allow you to handle movement and side actions while you use motion controls for your main method of interaction/attack. Motion controls are fantastic in games like Skyward Sword, Infamous 2, Resident Evil 4, and the like and they're not rail shooters.
And voice commands can be done with a headset.
And its a good thing the modern kinect totally allows you to build games that use both the camera and your controller at the same time.
This complaint sits better with the kinect 1, where that was a valid complaint and a rather dumb policy on MS's part.
I actually like Windows 8 in many ways now I'm used to it. Though I don't know what it was like pre 8.1 or whatever, but I like it. I bought my new computer dreading Windows 8 as the OS equivalent of Hitler, so I was pleasantly surprised.
Kinnect is freaking great for a small subset of game types. But without buttons, it's pretty much impossible to create a motion controlled game that isn't on rails. Buttons allow you to handle movement and side actions while you use motion controls for your main method of interaction/attack. Motion controls are fantastic in games like Skyward Sword, Infamous 2, Resident Evil 4, and the like and they're not rail shooters.
And voice commands can be done with a headset.
And its a good thing the modern kinect totally allows you to build games that use both the camera and your controller at the same time.
This complaint sits better with the kinect 1, where that was a valid complaint and a rather dumb policy on MS's part.
Kinect 2 is waaaaay better this time around but most people still feel burned by the Wii and first Kinect. Plus they really didn't have an all out blitz of games like the first Kinect did (Dance Central, Gunstringer, Child of Eden, Fruit Ninia, XBLA Kinect titles, a Disney Kinect and Star Wars Kinect game...). This time we had... a crappy fighting game and Kinect Sports? Of course it's gonna be abandoned when they never supported it in the first place.
The Kinect really shines as a voice control-peripheral. MS could have pushed it harder but at the end of the day most customers just want a plain jane game machine. It's a shame they even pushed it on people from the start if this was going to happen.
Ultimately it's going to be good for them, since now they'll sell much more even with PS4 this coming holiday. That's a great thing. Plus they have made great strides to improving how XBL gold works, thanks to competition from PSN plus. I am not too upset over losing the online-version of the Xbone, since it looks like we've gotten a much better system in place now.
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syndalisGetting ClassyOn the WallRegistered User, Loves Apple Productsregular
I actually like Windows 8 in many ways now I'm used to it. Though I don't know what it was like pre 8.1 or whatever, but I like it. I bought my new computer dreading Windows 8 as the OS equivalent of Hitler, so I was pleasantly surprised.
Kinnect is freaking great for a small subset of game types. But without buttons, it's pretty much impossible to create a motion controlled game that isn't on rails. Buttons allow you to handle movement and side actions while you use motion controls for your main method of interaction/attack. Motion controls are fantastic in games like Skyward Sword, Infamous 2, Resident Evil 4, and the like and they're not rail shooters.
And voice commands can be done with a headset.
And its a good thing the modern kinect totally allows you to build games that use both the camera and your controller at the same time.
This complaint sits better with the kinect 1, where that was a valid complaint and a rather dumb policy on MS's part.
And that game was released after they reversed the policy on kinect games being allowed to use controllers.
When the original kinect launched, you had to put your controller down and do everything with the camera.
there are a FEW games that came out towards the end, like that one, which let you use both, and the games were still somewhat hampered by the reduced skeletal granularity and weaker cameras.
SW-4158-3990-6116
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
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upper management both in microsoft and in the games division has shifted several times since the original decision to include the kinect as an integral component. the kinect was very much a "console vision" sort of decision (no pun intended), and it's likely that whoever developed the vision is now no longer in a position to be insisting on it.
i continue to think it's a mistake for MS to have chipped their key differentiators away (digital distro, always online, kinect) to the point where they're now competing with the PS4 on last-gen footing. there is obviously a vocal cadre of core gamers who wanted the xbone to be a 360 with updated gfx chip and nothing more, but i personally was excited to see some innovation and differentiation between the consoles.
it seems to me that the ps4 already offered exactly what this cadre wanted (with more gigaflops or whatever, plus japanese exclusives) and it doesn't seem like the xbone is particularly suited to competing on those particular terms. it strikes me as a mistake, but more importantly to me, it's a disappointing abandonment of an interesting vision.
fwiw, and maybe this is because there is such a launch games drought, my household gets much more use out of the xbone's media capabilities (using kinect!) than i get use out of it as a games machine. frankie loves the kinect. hopefully their new sku offering won't mean a literal abandonment of kinect refinements or development (though i fear the worst).
http://support.xbox.com/en-US/my-account/xbox-live-membership/live-faq
Holy fuck, the average is 35? That doesn't seem right.
I'd rather see the Median age.
fake edit: Actually 35 is about right. Those are parents buying games for their kids.
Well, unless you're the CEO of Bastards Incorporated, where the specialty is screwing over consumers, I guess.
apple's been extraordinarily successful with their bold-vision-oriented approach. when you couldn't buy an iphone with a physical keyboard people went berserk but they held the line and now you basically can't find a phone with a physical keyboard.
MS looked like they were striking out in this direction with win 8 and win mobile and xbone, but are now backpedaling furiously to their more comfortable stance.
The last few years Microsoft pretty much ignored what actual consumers wanted and rammed ahead whatever sounded great to the suits, thinking the world would bend to their will. See also: Windows 8.
But Irond Will is right, there's new management and they're working on trying to give people what they want. They've made it so that PC users can pretty much ignore the much-hyped tile screen in Windows 8, after all. In that light dropping Kinect is pretty much in the same line of thinking.
Wise to get this news out of the way before E3, as it's not really something you want to get applause for.
I doubt the performance gains will be that significant.
Critical Failures - Havenhold Campaign • August St. Cloud (Human Ranger)
You know, I am now disappointed they didn't do it at their conference.
Would they have got boos or applause from the audience? I think it might have been more mixed than you think.
Probably true, though mixed booing and applause probably isn't the tone you want either. Hopefully this is MS deciding their backs are against the wall and it's time to put up a fight that's not based on keeping the course and buying exclusivity.
pure digital distro offers advantages and a streamlined supply chain. it cuts out resellers and focuses revenue at the developer and publisher. it's a great innovation. but it obviously requires some form of drm different from the drm they load into discs.
and we don't know what sorts of gameplay innovations might have come out of a guaranteed kinect. it's a really interesting and powerful piece of technology, and it's just churlish to insist that, because you weren't personally awed by either of the launch titles (outside of Dance Central) it is therefore "barely functional".
it's a shame to the development of gaming in general that MS is sloughing off its differentiators. the xbone was developed around those, and if they fully strip them away all that's left is a ps4 with a better UI and less gigahertz.
The biggest shame about all of this is not that the kinect is going to be less supported now (which is a stupid choice) but it's the full on giving up of the digital ideas that Microsoft was pushing a year ago, they were smart and new and would have been so much less hassle, and they could have been refined to please more people (ie 3 or 7 or 30 day check-ins instead of daily, etc)
Also hilarious news: in Canada it's now official that the kinectless xbox one cost $399, which means that the Xbox One is now CHEAPER than the PS4 in this country, which costs $450. So that is damn interesting.
You can say "You don't know what it could have done!" and I can say "Here is what it did do".
Which is carry on a tradition of 4 years of barely functional, frustrating and entirely bafflingly badly designed games. It's actually been pointed out earlier in the thread and was a good point that was missed, but Microsoft needed to sell the Kinect with a very strong title straight up. That they didn't was a massive problem and why they have been forced into this position. They never provided any evidence that the Kinect was a worthwhile device, either at the launch of the Xbone (the two main games they have released for it), or over the past four years.
And again, people have tried to make innovative games using the Kinect and the most frequent result was "Why couldn't we do this with a controller just more accurately?". I don't mention Dance Central as a success to degrade it, because it's a fantastic game but it is in fact one of the few genuine examples of the Kinect doing what it should. Is a device that is good for a narrow range of games, notably "Dance Genre" worth imposing $100?
The answer is clearly no.
You neglected the part where if you lost internet access you couldn't play your games anymore after 24 hours until you reconnected.
You also missed the part where the console and account were region locked, so you actually COULDN'T access your games "Anywhere in the world without issues", because you wouldn't be able to play on the account outside of the country the account was made in (so a US account would not work in Australia).
I mean, it's not Draconian if you don't acknowledge what it actually did.
Also along with the average age of players going up, the kind of parents you're talking about here, that are ignorant of gaming at large and don't have any interest in it, they don't buy consoles anymore.
They buy apps on devices that they already were going to own anyway for their kids to play with.
This is one of the reasons that the Wii U is such a failure. Back when the Wii was new, this group of people would still be buying 'whatever video game thing' for their kids, now there's no need to waste all that money on 'games' because the appstore has 'games' for .99 cents.
Parents that buy consoles now, are mostly getting them for older kids that know exactly what they want, or they are buying them for their use as well because they also play games.
Steam IS awesome. The problem is that my Steam account works on every PC I will build from now until the future. Also games I bought that are 10+ years old still work just fine on my current rig. Could Microsoft guarantee that all past and future games work on a digital-only console? What happens with XBox One Two comes out? Will all those games work or will I have to deal with keeping it around if I want to play those games again.
It says "refund"; I wonder if that's actual, factual money, or Microsoft Funbucks? I expect the latter, but hope for the former.
They needed to refine the idea, not just abandon it wholesale. Such a mistake.
Say what you will about the Wii's motion controls, but they introduced it with Wii Sports, which turned out to be the ultimate killer app for casuals. It worked well, it was accessible, it was new.
But within Microsoft, the closest thing they created themselves to show off Kinect was -- Wii Sports. Or their version, at least. The best Kinect games were made outside Microsoft, and without direction from Microsoft. I remember reading how Harmonix struggled to come up with a way to surf the menus in Dance Central, before eventually creating that neat "slide to select" thing. And The Gunstringer was created based on a truly epic bit of bullshitting they managed to turn into a fun game.
http://www.joystiq.com/2011/09/26/the-three-terrifying-minutes-that-created-the-gunstringer/
Why couldn't the people who came up with this intriguing technology actually sit down and show other developers how it's done with a great showcase for that technology? Maybe that's part of the reason most Kinect games were the same kind of thing the Wii got.
Nah, there's just blood in the water, which has worked some people into a frenzy. Again. ironically the tone of these threads seems like it's come full circle into the state it was last year.
Well those restrictions didn't survive to shipping, that was the point of the backlash. But the point is, that if you want to sugarcoat what the DRM was that's your prerogative: But it doesn't change that you can't go all revisionist history on what they did do. The DRM was draconian and you might want to pretend those restrictions weren't a part of it but they were. Your post implies that it was a check in and oh wow, the DRM wasn't so bad! However, that is absolutely 100% false and you can easily find people who travel (military), those who wanted to import in Europe for example (Someone from Poland could not import an Xbone and have it work on a Polish account or IP, because the DRM prevented that. This was notably ironic because they had CD Projekt up on stage at their conference) or similar complaining about that decision.
Your "ideal" DRM that's not so bad is irrelevant to what they actually did do and that is what my post is referring to.
Fantasia got a lot of praise at E3, but has rather dropped off the radar now. I think Microsoft were hoping it would be that killer app that would convince people.
Actually, I really do admit I feel terrible for Harmonix. They're the only company who did consistently good things with the kinect and they've been pretty screwed by this.
The DLC is still one of the most amazing things ever contributed to gaming.
Sadly my bundle copy of Forza 5 came on a disc and because of the policy changes this is no longer a digital game with retail distribution but a old fashioned retail game with no benefits of convenience to me. I want to never have to use the disc ever and now I'm locked into it with no way of turning it into the digital game that was originally promised and that sucks.
And voice commands can be done with a headset.
// Switch: SW-5306-0651-6424 //
the kinect 2 is a far more functional device than the kinect 1 - assuming that all kinect 2 games would be constrained as and play just like kinect 1 games is as wrong as assuming NES games were doomed to be carbon copies of atari 2600 games.
also it is no surprise at all that the first-ever motion-controlled fighting game is going to have issues. fighting games with sticks and gamepads took literal decades to get where they are now, control-wise.
and who knows? maybe motion control really is always going to be terrible for video gaming and we'll never find any decent synergies outside of a dance title. i'm skeptical of this assertion though, especially given the immaturity of the field. there's a chicken-and-egg problem here - it's not profitable to develop to the kinect if no one owns one yet, and it's not profitable to sell the kinect if there aren't many great titles for it. these things take time, and MS was trying to bite the bullet and get things rolling.
i mean - you know what else is dreadful? every single application developed for the oculus rift. they're fucking awful! and probably will continue to be so for a real long time. this doesn't necessarily mean that VR is a dead-end technology though.
And its a good thing the modern kinect totally allows you to build games that use both the camera and your controller at the same time.
This complaint sits better with the kinect 1, where that was a valid complaint and a rather dumb policy on MS's part.
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
Sadly, I get migraines that are so debilitating they almost render me blind out of pain from the use of 3D and sadly VR technology as well (it's a genetic thing), but what I have seen out of an OR after trying one is infinitely, I mean infinitely, more compelling than anything I have seen out of Kinect in the ~5 years its been around. This is a device that caused me literal pain and yet I wanted to use it more the experience was so compellingly novel.
As for the rest of your post, it's all assumptions and hypothetical "But what if they really DID make a Kinect game that wasn't awful?!", while ignoring the gigantic elephant in the room of yet more completely awful or barely functional kinect games tradition being boldly carried on. It also seems that nobody seems to really know how to go about this or how to answer a simple "How does this make a better experience than a controller?" question.
i think they tried. i mean they got harmonix to develop fantasia and clearly tried to get lionhead to produce something - but of course molyneux is a chronic overpromiser and underdeliverer. there's another dance central on the way, of course.
but really it's an identical question as "why didn't either console have amazing launch titles?" it's hard and expensive to develop AAA games and not everything succeeds with the additional twist that reliable, advanced motion-control for games is a new technology and relatively fallow ground.
No, consumers are just fucking terrified of change
The Win8 interface is not confusing for more than ten minutes and no one but septuagenarians actually used the start menu to navigate to anything anyway, it was a cluttered shitty mess from its inception
I think it was called project milo? that was intended for the kinect, then the kinect 2 but nothing really came of it.
*drops mic*
That's a fucking 360 game
You're a really shitty troll
The Kinect really shines as a voice control-peripheral. MS could have pushed it harder but at the end of the day most customers just want a plain jane game machine. It's a shame they even pushed it on people from the start if this was going to happen.
Ultimately it's going to be good for them, since now they'll sell much more even with PS4 this coming holiday. That's a great thing. Plus they have made great strides to improving how XBL gold works, thanks to competition from PSN plus. I am not too upset over losing the online-version of the Xbone, since it looks like we've gotten a much better system in place now.
And that game was released after they reversed the policy on kinect games being allowed to use controllers.
When the original kinect launched, you had to put your controller down and do everything with the camera.
there are a FEW games that came out towards the end, like that one, which let you use both, and the games were still somewhat hampered by the reduced skeletal granularity and weaker cameras.
Let's play Mario Kart or something...