Kinect Pricing Not Confirmed After All
- Thread starter Logan Westbrook
- Start date
Maybe it's a marketing ploy all along?
They know they have a high price for it, so they announce the price being even higher and then lower it to their original estimated price to make it more acceptable.
They know they have a high price for it, so they announce the price being even higher and then lower it to their original estimated price to make it more acceptable.
I'm not buying it when it first comes out anyways. I'll wait for a few more games to come out, and some reviews on it before I do anything.
I'm figuring $125. Still, I figured they were getting desperate when they pulled in Cirque du Solei to help market the thing. This just confirms they really are desperate to sell this thing. Even Sony didn't back down over the $599.99 price tag on the launch PS3.Baby Tea said:
Wait, I don't get it...a big presentation means they are desperate to sell it?NickCaligo42 said:
And what does 'desperate to sell it' even mean? It's a new product, Of course they want to sell it. They want lots of people to buy it, just like every company with a product. And they haven't 'backed down' from a price at all, since none has even been officially set, so what does Sony have to do with this at all?
Well in my opinion, any price is too much for kinect, I wouldn't embarrass myself for free by pretending to be Godzilla, so why would I pay £1? But then again I'm not exactly their target market, I'm neither a 13 year old boy or a woman.
I'm not particularly fond of the Kinect, but what people aren't comprehending is that if you want to play with four people it's a bargain. The Move has ridiculous pricing if you haven't bought various accessories already, and a WiiMote and Nunchuck will run you aboot $60 not counting motion plus. If you're going to play single player, it's not worth the price relative to it's competitors, but the $150 range is reasonable if you're playing four player.
Nintendo and Sony offer Indie Game Developers a place to get their game sold to millions and Nintendo and Sony also offer Netflix Instant Streaming.HG131 said:
Oh, so you're assuming they're NOT lying about the fake $150 price point. Well, you asked, so I'll give you the whole hundred yards.Baby Tea said:
"Desperate to sell it" means they went "oh shit, our research shows that nobody who owns a 360 gives a crap about ANY of the games we're trying to hoist with this thing! And we were so counting on Sonic Riders! We'd better throw ENORMOUS amounts of marketing and advertising money at this thing in order to make it a huge spectacle and distract from the fact all we can make with it is pointless shovelware!"
THAT is what "desperate to sell it" means. Sony did the same thing with its ridiculous, pretentious commercials and outlandish claims of their hardware's capability when the PS3 was released ("The PS3 is 4D!" "Rumble is a last-gen feature!"), to great ridicule as they tried to make it look like something classier and more innovative than what it really was--that being a game console that cost twice as much as the 360 at the time and didn't offer as much compelling material. At the time, it was a $600 joke and everybody expected them to tank. In spite of HUGE backlash, though, they didn't back down from that price for a long time--despite really desperate efforts to reduce the price, to the extent that they removed various features from the console in order to do it (to even more outrage).
Similar situation here. Microsoft's trying to salvage what amounts to millions of dollars of wasted R&D on an expensive, gimmicky peripheral for an expensive console. The first phase is always trying to over-hype the crap out of the product. Microsoft's got more hurdles to overcome here, though, so it's understandable if they want to back down from their initial price.
We call it the "Sega CD effect." They're marketing the peripheral to everybody, but the cold, hard fact is that they really can only sell it to people who already have the one $300 hunk of hardware that's necessary just to plug it in. Everybody else has to drop $300 for a new 360 in addition to the price tag on the Kinect. From the standpoint of those who already do own 360s, yes, the technology is impressive, but the dilemma is twofold here.
First, gamers won't buy hardware that doesn't have solid support, first- or third-party. It's simple economics. A new console, no matter how neat its developers say it is, just isn't worth it if there's no games that I want for it.
Second, developers won't develop games for hardware that doesn't have good distribution. If nobody owns the console to begin with, it's a colossal risk to develop for it since nobody will be around to buy my game. A colossal risk, that is, unless the console's developer gives me a boatload of money to make a game for it.
So, Microsoft needs to sell units in order to get developers to make compelling games so that they can sell more units. It's the dilemma that every new console faces, the bane of the Dreamcast and the PS3 both, and it's the worst possible spot to be in with a peripheral. Sega tried to do it with the Sega CD; the Sega Genesis didn't sell any better and the Sega CD only caught a tiny portion of people who already had a Sega Genesis. I predict they'll be more successful than that given that motion control is vastly more appealing than CD storage was, but... not much more successful, relatively speaking with regards to the 360's distribution versus the Genesis's distribution.
An analyst predicted three million Kinect units or so. Well, three million of those--or even six--compared to the THIRTY million 360 owners doesn't approach what they need to make this catch on with developers. To put it in perspective, the average SUCCESSFUL title, like Mass Effect, will catch on with about three million of those thirty million. Above-average titles will catch on with over ten million, though most of those are cross-platform now--and where they ARE peripheral-dependent, as with Guitar Hero and Rock Band, the peripheral at least isn't exclusive to a single console, is relatively cheap, and has oodles of support and compatibility across multiple different games within both series.
Still, what does that number look like with the Kinect if you're a developer? What fraction of three million can you expect to appeal to if you could only OPTIMISTICALLY expect about two or three out of thirty? Can you really afford to make anything ambitious or impressive with that kind of a prospect? Can you really afford to do it AT ALL given how complex the technology behind its motion controls must be? Is it even a tool worth learning to use?
This should give you some idea of why I'm skeptical.