“We are also continuing to invest in Kinect, and are looking forward to launching the Cortana personal assistant on Xbox One in 2016.” — Microsoft’s Larry “Major Nelson” Hryb, stressing that Kinect isn’t dead even as Microsoft lets first-party software support sink to Vita-like levels and discounts the hardware in all its forms.
Elsewhere in the business of gaming this week…
STAT | 13 million — Electronic Arts’ projection for the number of copies of Star Wars: Battlefront it will ship… by the end of March, 2016.
QUOTE | “We need non-profit foundations that see the importance of supporting games along the margins — not to help turn them into developers of saleable games, but to allow them to make games from the messy, fragile lens of art.” — Outgoing IndieCade co-chair John Sharp, in a blog explaining how he came to see developer-focused conferences as more of a problem than a solution for marginalised creators.
QUOTE | “Streamers and eSports athletes are the new celebrities.” — Newzoo CEO Peter Warman explaining his research firm’s partnership with eSports organisation Fnatic.
QUOTE | “So Long, and Thanks for All the Gamerscore!” — Eric Neustadter, Xbox Live’s director of architecture, announcing his decision to leave Microsoft after 18 years.
STAT | Well over 25 million — The current PlayStation 4 installed base, according to SCE Worldwide Studios VP Michael Denny.
STAT | 39 million — Xbox Live monthly active users, as reported by Microsoft. The Xbox One maker has stopped reporting hardware sales figures, but its replacement stat doesn’t say how many of those users pay for Xbox Live Gold, or how many are playing on Xbox One systems.
QUOTE | “The very low end of mobile game development seems likely to go away, or it will truly become like hoping to get hit by lightning.” — Kabam president Aaron Loeb, sharing his company’s expectation for the future of mobile games.
QUOTE | “More people played RedLynx’s free games on phones and tablets than they did on consoles and PC.” — Atte Ilvessuo, co-founder of Trials developer RedLynx and founder of upstart mobile studio MotionVolt, putting into perspective the scope of his past experience on mobile.
STAT | $US1.9 billion — Research firm Superdata’s estimate for worldwide revenues from eSports in 2018; That figure assumes the market will more than double in the next three years, and includes sponsorships and advertising, wagering, fantasy sports sites, prize pools, amateur tournaments, merchandise and ticket sales.
QUOTE | “Technologists, artists, and fans should not have to get permission from the government-and rely on the contradictory and often nonsensical rulings before investigating whether their car is lying to them or using their phone however they want.” — Electronic Frontier Foundation Legal Director Corynne McSherry, shortly after the EFF was victorious in winning an exemption allowing users to bypass DRM on some abandoned games.
QUOTE | “The way the industry’s changing today, your tails aren’t as long. There’s so much content that comes out, you can’t rely on two or three years of revenue from a game like you could in years past.” — Double Eleven COO Mark South, explaining why his company specialises in ports of proven games instead of original IP.
QUOTE | “We take our responsibilities with regards to our fans, especially children, very seriously and would never knowingly ignore the ASA or any directives relating to our responsibilities.” — Mochi Monsters developer Mind Candy, explaining why it hadn’t fixed its advertising months after the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority violated codes in how it pitched subscription services to children.
Comments
16 responses to “This Week In The Business: Kinect Is Totally Not Dead”
The kinect may not be dead but nothing interesting is happening with it.
Is there a link for the price reductions of Kinect Hardware?
Oh right. Kinect… I actually forgot it existed
I used to use my Kinect for everything, it was awesome. Now? Apps like Netflix have removed nearly all Kinect features outside play/pause making it useless, NXOE preview can’t even go to pins via Kinect anymore, the shortcut is RT on the controller, and the new generation controllers can’t sync via Kinect, you have to press the physical button on the side of the console.
Kinect isn’t dead, it’s just being left to die a long slow death.
Weird coincidence, my Kinect died this past week…
Did anyone ever seriously believe that Kinect was anything but a me-too gimmick?
I hoped it would work as advertised. It did not. The tech just isn’t ready yet. 360 felt like an Alpha, XB1 feels like a Beta.
I thought Microsoft would push harder for it. Their mistake was not eating the price of Kinect hardware to distribute it… but then it cut cut, then they stopped selling stand-alone units online. Now? All the highest tier Xbox SKUs exclude it entirely in favour of 1TB HDD and download codes. If even your most expensive bundles dumped the Kinect, what’s the install base going to look like? When the console launched, 100% of Xboxes had Kinect; what is it now, 50%? What will it be in a year? Two years? No wonder no one wants to develop software for it.
I dunno, I use my Kinect all the time. Not for games, though, just for voice commands.
But that renders Kinect pretty much pointless. Without all the camera / motion sensing stuff, what’s the point? You don’t need Kinect for voice commands – a simple (and cheap) microphone would be enough.
1080p face tracking skype cam is pretty damned sweet. Except the Xbox is so slow to answer calls that you miss them.
Yeah, the camera itself is pretty cool – but when you say “Xbox, Answer” or whatever, it has to slowly open the app and then the person has to call you back. Bit stupid, but otherwise Skype works really well.
Uses for Kinect:
– Letting it see my face to login to my XBLive account
– The odd voice command when my hands are too dirty to touch the controller
Does MS’s insistence that Kinect isn’t dead remind anybody of the Monty Python dead parrot sketch, or is that just me?
Reminded me more of that Miracle Max scene in The Princess Bride. Like Microsoft is insisting that ‘Kinect is not dead. It’s just mostly dead, which is slightly alive!’
Kinect is not useless, and I doubt anyone guinely wanted it to die.
I think what everyone really wanted was for it not to be shoehorned into places where it had no business being and was not fucking wanted.
No-one likes forced, unintuitive novelty-control gimmicks which are very obviously only there because there was new technology to showcase and the developer got told they had to make use of it somehow so it could be shown off by marketing.