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Is Microsoft's Kinect a Gaming Failure?
MojoKid writes "E3 is well underway in Los Angeles, and Microsoft has already made a major splash with its 'SmartGlass' technology, game demos, and its announcement that a Kinect-powered version of Internet Explorer will debut on the Xbox 360. This is a marked change from last year, when Kinect was the unquestioned centerpiece of Microsoft's display and the company's demos focused on how Kinect-powered games used your full body as a controller. Kinect is in the interesting position of having sold extremely well while failing to move the bar forward in any of the ways Microsoft projected in the run up to its launch. Scroll through the ratings on Kinect-required titles, and the percentages are abysmal. Kinect's biggest problem is rooted in ergonomics. Gamepads with buttons may be crude approximations of real life, but they're simple and intuitive. They're also flexible — a great many games have conditional scenarios that allow the same button to perform different functions depending on what's going on within the game. Pure Kinect games don't have a simple mechanism to incorporate these features, and there's no easy way around them. The motion-controller's most enduring features may ultimately be its capabilities outside the gaming sphere."
The future is but one word: dildonics. Get in on the ground floor this time, MS!
QUOTE: " Kinect's biggest problem is rooted in ergonomics. Gamepads with buttons may be crude approximations of real life, but they're simple and intuitive."
I wish Nintendo would let players *choose* if they want to use the motion sensor, or a controller. I wasted 3 hours trying to beat the *first* boss in Metroid Prime 3. If I had been able to use the standard Gamecube controller as the previous games, it would have been dead in mere minutes.
Pikmin and Zelda: TZ and Sonic Adventure 5(?) were also a pain in the butt. Fortunately I was able to go back to the Gamecube versions and play them instead with a solid functional controller. The Wii's motion control is okay for simple games like tennis or bowling, but a PITA for complex games.
BTW I'm not the only one to make this complaint. The guys over at speeddemosarchive also complained that MP3's controls were a mess and often don't register inputs.
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While I agree that the motion controller features could be considered a failure for gaming purposes, its voice control capabilities are its most enduring feature to me. Being able to control the various video streaming services by talking to the TV still feels like we are living in the future.
Scroll through the ratings on Kinect-required titles, and the percentages are abysmal.
Scroll through? Scroll where? Let's head over to amazon then and see how they're doing:
Do I need to keep scrolling? I don't see many games with reviews under 3 stars. Where are these supposed abysmal ratings?
Can I use Metro in the Cloud with SmartGlass, or will I need a wizard to help me?
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. --Will
The games where it has supported a traditional controller are actually very engaging. I love just yelling "Tali sabotage" while aiming normally. Similar in Skyrim, dragon shouting in dragon language is pretty neat. As far as motion tracking, the Steel Battalion demo was REALLY frustrating the first time I tried it. THEN I tried playing it like i was actually there by using quick motions instead of trying to "hover over controls" and press and hold. And it just clicked. It's now one of the titles I am anticipating. It's been mostly gimmick waggle and dance so far. But the opportunity is there; heck just add head tracking to all first person shooters and you make something awesome....
I love Valve, but just because the biggest publishers don't make games you want doesn't mean they don't make games that most people want. Here's the list of the 10 best selling games in the US for 2011:
1. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (360, PS3, Wii, PC) - Activision
2. Just Dance 3 (Wii, 360, PS3) - Ubisoft
3. Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (360, PS3, PC) - Bethesda
4. Battlefield 3 (360, PS3, PC) - EA
5. Madden NFL 12 (360, PS3, Wii, PSP, PS2) - EA
6. Call of Duty: Black Ops (360, PS3, Wii, NDS, PC) - Activision
7. Batman: Arkham City (360, PS3, PC) - Warner Brothers
8. Gears of War 3 (360) - Microsoft
9. Just Dance 2 (Wii) - Ubisoft
10. Assassin's Creed: Revelations (360, PS3, PC) - Ubisoft
Basically, all the publishers everyone hates and swears they'll never buy from again dominate the list. I hate a lot of them too (although the only one I won't buy from anymore is Ubisoft), but I don't pretend that my views are the norm. The fact is EA, Activision and Ubisoft basically print money, whether I like their games or not I have to admit they're doing something right.
I picked up a 360 with Kinect for my parents a couple of weeks ago. Controllers are becoming more difficult for them to use; and I figured controlling a game with whole body movements would work better for them.
So far they've really enjoyed it; it seems to be a good fit for the same casual gamers who have been using a Wii, but want games that are a bit more complex.
kickstarter has been getting my funds lately, but only for DRM free games.
I guess that makes me a pirate... that gives money away?
You mean kinda like what LEAP is showing off?
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
Valve never publishes sales numbers, and as it's not a publicly traded company, it doesn't have to.
I have no idea whether Portal 2 should or shouldn't be in that list, but the lack of information about a major publisher like Valve automatically makes any statistic bogus.
Microsoft promoted the Kinect as intuitive. But being intuitive is not enough for motion controls. The motion itself must be fun to do. Thus your dance games are very popular because dancing is fun. Aerobics is fun for some people and painfull for others. Running in place is not very fun. The Kinect is succesfull if all it does is replace dance pads. That is a big enough market for gaming companies to put out games.
This is the same nonsense that goes on in every media industry. There are artists that produce what's really changing the industry, that are creating the real art.... Then there are giant media houses that do nothing more than buy up the content those artists made, promote and capitalize on it. Music is a perfect example. Really great bands often don't make much money... soon after they make their debuet, revolutionary album, all of the hack bands that have their music written for them are doing the same thing, but have huge publishers behind them paying radio stations to play their songs and getting them spots on Jay Lenno.
Did you notice that every single title in that list is a sequel? And none of them are even based on a game that wasn't half assed copy of something some smaller studio designed first. The difference is marketing dollars.
Missing the point here. I'm speaking of the growing disillusion between large dev houses and the gaming public. Most of E3 was about shit that has almost nothing in common with the games on that list. It's not about whats happening now, or in the past. It's what's happening in the future.
Look at Japan to see the future. What's coming out of Japan? Nothing. Nothing at all. Once the undisputed game dev empire and they are nowhere on your list. What's happening at EA now is what alredy happened at Capcom. Big dev houses buy up the small ones, and burn them.
Eventually people will get bored of muddy FPS and action 3D platform games. What E3 showed us is that the big players have no plans for what's next. None at all.
Gabe knows. Apple knows. Indy devs know. - I'll be proven right in 5-6 years.
I have zero desire to play on a tiny screen. If I did I would have bought a Gameboy a decade ago, but instead I prefer the full-sized games on TV just as I prefer full-sized movies on TV, not something on my little phone.
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The average kinect game involves making some exaggerated flailing motions that map onto some canned animations. Even then it often screws up or gets confused. There's only so far you can go with that system. Sports / fitness / dance games are the main focus but there isn't much beyond that. There have been a few genuinely innovative attempts to use kinect in a novel way that have almost succeeded such as Once Upon a Monster but most games have been dire and people have gotten bored of it.
How many of those 1 million units were used to actually play games though? Of all the people I know with a kinect (several), none of them even own xboxes. They use it with their PC to make motion controlled apps (which also fail, as it requires a kinect and not enough people have a kinect).
The stupid thing though is that Kinect voice controls have NOTHING AT ALL to do with the Kinect hardware. All that analysis is done on the Xbox itself. Sure it is using Kinect code, but the code runs on the CONSOLE, it is not run on the Kinect hardware like the 3D processing.
Which means that all of these games that have voice control could EASILY have had this enabled using the headset, if Microsoft wanted to allow that. But they'd much rather push more stupid Kinect sales.
Chuck it in the failure pile with the Jaguar, 32X, and the Wii.
Whether Kinect is a failure depends on exactly how you define success.
-- Controlling the games we're used to playing on the xbox? FAIL.
-- Getting good reviews from people who review games on our favorite gaming websites? FAIL.
-- Selling a lot of units? WIN.
-- Has some games that some consumers really like? WIN.
-- Good as an input mechanism for some interesting non-traditional uses? WIN.
-- The future of gaming? FAIL.
-- The future of computer-human interaction? PROBABLY.
As an additional note, the first version isn't terribly awesome, but inevitably it'll get better in the future.
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
I play video games specifically because I *want* to sit on my lard arse while blowing up aliens, flinging birds or jumping on turtles. Back in my day, you only got up in front of the TV and flailed around madly if you were a sore losing spazz. Yes, I just played the grumpy old gamer card.
Rot in hell Kinect, Dance Dance Revolution, Wii Sports and any other video game concept that dares pollute my holy pastime with elements of "gym class"!
---
DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
they don't publish sales numbers but Gabe Newell came out and said"Newell stated that Portal 2 had shipped more than 4 million units, with the personal computer versions outselling the console versions; overall, both Portal and Portal 2 had shipped more than 8 million units. " so that info is avalible.
First of all, you might as well drop the sports games as I know sports nuts and they wouldn't give a shit if you put out the same game every year just as long as you have the updated rosters. hell i know one with a standing order at gamestop, they charge his CC and have the latest Madden and MLB games delivered to his door on release day, he never even bothers with reviews because ALL he cares about are the rosters.
The same could probably said for the Call of Honor: Gears of Killzone as again that is a niche that doesn't care about anything but the latest MP maps, again you can just crank out the same product as long as it has new MP maps they'd be just as happy. try logging into any of the older versions when a new one comes out and they quickly become ghost towns, its strictly about new MP maps.
The thing you have to give valve credit for is they are one of the few developers where their games actually have legs. Just for shits and giggles i logged into HL 1 DM and was dodging rockets in a fully loaded server in seconds, whereas I did the same thing with Bioshock II which isn't even half as old and gave up after 20 minutes because there were only 2 people in the entire game.
So to me a lot of that list is like fast food, sure it sells but how many will even remember it in a year? off that list i'd say Skyrim, Batman aaaand...that's about it. Ubisoft has gotten so nasty with the DRM that after the buzz wears off they have a hard time selling them while the dancing games, at least from what I've seen, are only played until the next new thing comes out. i have to wonder if like the music games that it won't be a fad that suddenly dies hard. Valve can sell there games year after year because they have real legs so I have to wonder who makes more money overall. Personally I'd love to see the figures on how many copies of HL1 and 2 they have sold since release, i bet the money they are getting on them even now is just crazy for older games.
As far as Kinect goes I don't own an X360 so i can't say for sure but the one thing i hear4 reviewers bitching about over and over is how inconsistent it is, that one time a move works perfectly and the next time the same move fails horribly. For an example of what i'm talking about check out these reviews from Angry Joe where it pretty much comes down to Kinect problems ruining the games. Personally other than the dancing games i really don't see what the problem with controllers was that the Kinect was supposed to solve, other than "We need something like the Wii!" which is ironic because most folks i know with a Wii break it out a couple of times a year when a big Nintendo release hits and then back into the closet it goes.
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Video capture systems to interact with computers have been around since the Amiga, and they are great for some games in some situations, but on the other hand you dont want to move your furniture to jump around like a dolt for every single game, it gets tiresome, tedious, and frustrating. Yea great you have had fun with them for a little while, but where does it end up? Right next to your WII, move, eye-toy, light guns, activator and rock-n-roller. Whats your next console going to have in the box? A gamepad.
You mean kinda like what LEAP is showing off?
Leap is only for your hands, and only covers 8 cubic feet. Not nearly the same thing as kinect, so referring to it as a more polished version of kinect seems a bit silly to me.
I've always felt the kinetic will make a great party game. It will also do great for things like exercise videos, and personal trainer type games.
But face it, if people wanted to play sports, they'd go outside and play sports. I play video games because I am not fast enough, dexterous enough, or in shape enough to stand there and participate in the game. I want to sit on the couch and play.
But its more than that. How long do you want to stand there with your arm held out doing something. Everyone talks about Minority Report were Cruise was waving his hands around in the air. That'll work for all of about 15 seconds. A keyboard words because my arms rest on my desk. The mouse works because my hand rests on the mouse and the arm on my desk. A controller works because my hands have feedback and my arms rest on my lap or couch or knees or somewhere.
I think kinetic and its ilk are here to stay. BUT it is not a controller for every type of game. party games, dance games, exercise... but everything else give me a good old fashioned controller
The biggest problem with kinect is the amount of space required to be able to use it, not many people have that much space in front of the TV.. It's great tech, especially if it's supplemented with a Move-controller..
I disagree.
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Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Yep. Everybody I know who owns a Kinect is using it as a 3D scanner (or something similar).
Nobody plays games with them.
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Try metacritic (rounded to the next 5%) :
Kinect Sports 75% metacritic (90% amazon)
Kinect sport 2 65% (amazon 80%) Kinect star wars 35% user score (55% professional) amazon 70%.
Kinect disneyland 75% (amazon 70%).
I did not bother looking up the rest, but from the user score in my experience is that those are average or good game, but not *special* or incredible. I think the GP exagerated with his abysmal precentage, but they cetrainly are not excellent percentage.
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In 1984-85 I helped develop a 3D mouse (I called it "the bat, a mouse that flew") for use with a real 3D display we had running to explore 3D images from our real time 3D CT image scanner. The bat could control point cursors as well as line and plane cursors. Hardware limitations made it slow, but beyond that, fatigue soon set in while using the device, making it unrealistic for use in practical applications. I'm not surprised that Kinect seems to be suffering from a fate that I perceive as similar.
By Maturity, I mean of the tech. Kinect is cool, no doubt, but it's still rather mediocre at tracking subtle movements. This means it works for games that feature gross physical gestures, but still it's nothing like as high a level as resolution as the cheapest controllers.
By Context I mean of the game. If I'm playing a boxing game on my couch, I might want to just play the game, and not actually BOX. If I want to go play golf, I'll go play golf (ie outdoors). If I'm playing Skyrim at midnight, I might not want to be SHOUTING dragon-shouts in my thin-walled apartment. There are lots of games that work great with the system, but in my view a roughly-equal level of reasons NOT to want to play with anything but a controller.
-Styopa
A problem I think Kinect is struggling with is standardized control conventions.
On gamepads, navigating menus by moving the thumbstick in the direction of the item you want to select is intuitive and a standard way of how basically all games (I should say UI's) work. It's also a standard convention to have the A button select or accept things and have the B button go back to the previous screen or cancel actions. Does Kinect have such standardized control mechanisms?
I got to try the Kinect recently as part of a "workout" game review. While I liked the game itself, the Kinect had serious drawbacks. Mostly, I found that my living room was too small for it. It wouldn't be able to see me (no matter how I situated the Kinect) until my heels were pushing against my couch. Try doing a workout while your feet bump against your couch repeatedly. It's possible, but much harder than if the Kinect let me take a step or two forward. Then, if I was doing any kind of movement that shook the floorboards, the Kinect would vibrate just enough to cause it to "lose" me. My workout would be interrupted (after a second of my avatar doing nothing) and I would need to reestablish contact. Then, I'd continue the workout and it would lose me again.
People with small rooms or floors that don't absorb movement impact should beware that the Kinect might not work as advertised.
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Just like the PS2 Move and the Wii, the Kinect is for casual gaming. If you don't like dancing, or petting furry animals, then it isn't for you. It isn't fast enough or accurate enough for fast hardcore gaming. Hardcore gamers don't want to spend 14 hours straight doing excercise: they want to zone out into the virtual world by pushing buttons. If you want to capture the Call of Duty market, do the opposite of the Kinect: make a direct brain interface.
The Kinect is a casual gaming success. It allowed Microsoft to enter the niche market that Nintendo controlled.
That's a natural cycle in the gaming industry. Every 5-10 years we'll have something big and revolutionary hit the market but in between it's the same regurgitated crap which is where we're headed. People need to be be bored and forget about the current selection of games before they become interested in a new wave of games based on something from 10 years ago.
Judgmental, boring, pedantic, and trying to pass a sentence fragment off as proof of his own command of the English language...
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That's what they recommend, but I have a very small house, and in reality it works in a space smaller than that. And it doesn't have to be a space straight from the wall, it can be diagonal. Really if you don't have enough space in your entertainment room for it to work, you are probably sitting too close to the TV.
YES
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