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Sony's Favorite Gadget Is Kinect
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Gary Marshall writes that.Microsoft's marvelous motion-sensing device is doing really good work for Sony, helping the PS4 outsell the Xbox One in the US and rocketing it to the top of the world's console sales charts. With the Xbox One $100 more expensive than the PlayStation 4, the Kinect is the explanation for the huge difference in price between the rival platforms says Marshall. "That kind of money makes a huge difference, and I wonder: if Microsoft had kept the Kinect as an optional add-on, which we all know it should be, would the Xbox One be much more attractive?" Ben Kuchera describes the peripheral as one of the most hated pieces of equipment in current use. "The system is still new, but every Xbox One owner now has a peripheral that has little reason to exist, aids their gaming in very few real ways and costs them a significant amount of money." The common defense of the Kinect is that developers wouldn't support it unless it was forced on consumers but according to Kuchera pushing a product on the public with the hope that it will be useful once we have it is a cruel inversion of how product adoption should be handled. "The forced pack-in proves something we already knew at the beginning of this generation: Almost no one would want to buy the Kinect separately if they were given the choice," writes Kuchera. "It's time to make the Kinect a peripheral, not a pack-in.""
Microsoft started including ads on the xbox home page last generation. It was enough for me to entirely drop purchasing anything at all for it(and definitely not xbox 1). I had no reason to believe the PS4 is better in that regard, so they get ignored too.
I wish they'd both make everything a lot less social and less connected. I don't want to go into another persons house if they have the NSA/GCHQ spy cam installed. I don't know what the police think I've done and come get me regardless. Think they wouldn't?
Luckily the games are awful so I've not need to buy either.
Microsoft is going to hold on to that thing for as long as they can. It's not going away for several different reasons.
The first and largest is that the Kinect is a product differentiater. It makes the XBone different from the PS4. There really isn't that much a difference between the two boxes otherwise. Fine, you can go on with the technical differences between the types of RAM and the custom silicon for the XBone's APU but those are not large concerns for Mom and Dad buying little Sally's birthday present.
Until MS comes up with something besides the software that makes their product different, the Kinect is going to hang on. But the second that happens, it'll be tossed. They know they've screwed the pooch here. They know exactly what it cost them in terms of customer relations and in terms of developers.
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Maybe the new CEO will bring a change of attitude...
http://i.imgur.com/KON0j7C.jpg
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Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
The Kinect isn't the primary reason that the XB1 costs more and has worse performance than the PS4. The primary reason is that during the design phase, Microsoft's engineers overestimated the cost of GDDR5 RAM. As a result, they decided to go with DDR3 instead of GDDR5 for the 8GB of system memory, and compensate for the slower speeds by including a 32MB cache ("eSRAM") on the die. This cache is so large in terms of die space that it meant there was much less room for GPU – which is why the XB1 only has 768 shaders, compared to the PS4's 1152. Meanwhile, developers have to jump through all kinds of hoops to get decent performance out of the XB1 by carefully managing allocation of the on-die cache, while on the PS4 they can simply rely on all 8GB of memory being fast enough because it's all GDDR5.
So the result of this miscalculation is that the XB1 is more expensive to build (due to a faster die), more complex, and slower. Oops.
I have one someplace in a box. We used it about a month and decided it was useless crapware. The old WII does bowling SO much better than the kinnect is about the first thing you find out. It was always going out of area or not sensing the right motion and otherwise being useless.
Idiot indeed. He doesn't even understand the meaning of his main point, "peripheral".
Peripheral (of a device): able to be attached to and used with a computer, although not an integral part of it.
The fact that it's included with every Xbox One doesn't make it any less a peripheral. It can be unplugged and doesn't even have to be connected in the first place.
I use the Kinect rather heavily. As I use my XBox One as a media center more than a game system, the Kinect plays a large role in my usage. I like not needing to find a remote control to do anything with my setup. Also, with Skype I am able to see my grand children, as they have an XBox One as well. The ease of use is such that even my wife, who is not a geek, is able to utilize the system. Now, could they have sold it as an add-on, or as a bundle option. Yup.
Merf
If you want one cheap and don't want to wait for delivery for your Sony, simply check your area thrift stores. They are almost as common as Guitar Hero Guitars, Microphones, and Wii Balance Boards.
FYI, the Rock Band/Guitar Hero microphones show up on a PC as a decent Logitech USB Microphone. Not a bad mic for under $5.
The truth shall set you free!
Diskless consoles are great in theory. After all, who wants to go around physically inserting discs like it's the 1980's or somethin?. But, it comes with a cost--the inability to buy used discs or discs from third parties at a discount will keep prices outrageously high for games. Yes, in theory, they could reduce the price to make up for savings from using physical media, but they won't. A $60 game (which is way too expensive to begin with), will always be $60 as a download, whereas a $60 disc can be acquired cheaper new at amazon.com or ebay, and even less used. The only way a disc-less console would be attractive to the cost conscious consumer would be if they would guarantee a significantly lower price for content--like $30. That would be a big selling point.
If I were invested in the whole Xbox ecosystem I would resent having to shell out more for a device that basically brings nothing to the table as a gamer. Looking across at my PS4 'rivals' they basically get a more powerful console for a lot less money. To add insult to injury Xbox fanbois try and point out the flaws in the PS4 ecosystem, flaws which the XBox has too.. "Look, you have to pay for multiplayer now!", which although is a new added expense, was ALWAYS an expense for the XBox. Microsoft have already tweaked the XBox OS (Whatever its called) to reduce the CPU and memory usage of this device, but in doing so they admit that their console is the weaker of the two spec wise. All the way resisting the overwhelming public demand that they need to drop the requirement for the device and instead pushing their "living room agenda". In this day and age people are price conscious, Microsoft forgets this. Sure there are exclusives that tempt people to drop cash on an XBox, but the financial difference is so large, this "exclusive" system doesn't have the pull it once had. Microsoft needs to drop the mandatory add on requirement before its too late.
This reminds me of way back in the day when SOE increased the subscription to Everquest from $9.99 to $15.99 per month. Everyone decried it as the end to SOE, because they lost about 30% of their accounts (mostly alt accounts) But they were wrong, it was a great plan financially. If you have 100 users @ $10/month you're making $1000/month. If you have 67 customers @ $16/month you make $1072 AND you have less overhead. Also, a lot of those users eventually came back at the higher rate. SOE was making more money than ever and had fewer customers to serve. Not only that, but they set the standard for all their future MMOs and in fact, the industry in general settled on that rate.
So the question isn't in the popularity of the xbox, it's the profitability. If the Kinect makes each user more valuable via marketing and such, then the lower number of users may be a moot point. The only question is: Just how valuable will that marketing data be?
The other cost is if you require people to ONLY download games, they have to have a fast enough connection to make it worth it, and there is still a distribution cost to run download servers and give them bandwidth. Some parts of the world have metered internet, and some people may be on slower connections. It's also a trade-off between how long it takes to download, and how much you put into the game. Never underestimate the bandwidth of a 5 inch piece of polycarbonate. It's still too early for a dickless console to succeed.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Every single Xbox owner I know that has a Kinect does not use it at all. the games for it suck, even Forza Horizon had support for it but it rarely works right. and if you have windows behind you it fails completely.
The $100 difference does make a difference as well, I know a lot of hardcore console gamers looking at the PS4 instead of the Xbone this time around, and they were Xbox360 hardcore fanboys.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
pushing a product on the public with the hope that it will be useful once we have it is a cruel inversion of how product adoption should be handled.
Nonsense. People buy a product like a game console speculating that they will get future use out of it. This doesn't always pan out, as many second and third-gen consoles can demonstrate quite well. You can certainly make the argument (and I believe the author has) that the XBone raises the risk too high, and that's a valid point, but the only inversion going on here is the one between reality and wishful thinking.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
I don't want to see McDonalds garbage every time I play a game. ...
Then maybe you should clean your basement up before you game.
Be seeing you...
Yes exactly like drug addicts. We hold jobs, have families, live long lives, and stay out of trouble with law enforcement. Exactly like drug addicts.
As much as I'm not in favor of an always on camera controlled by a shady mega-corporation, anyone who lived through the late 80's-early 90's knows how little third party support you get when you have optional components.
I'm sure there were plenty more, but here are a few off the top of my head. (for the Genesis) Sega CD, Sega 32x. (for the NES) Powerglove, (for the Saturn) Twin-Stick, (for the PS2) Trance Vibrator, (for the DC) omg...so many. Maracas, Fishing Reels, Mice, Keyboards, Microphones, Cameras, etc.
None of the above got much love from developers, because of market fragmentation. The good news (for DC owners) was that those controllers allowed flawless ports of their arcade titles since you had the same controller setup...and also the Trance Vibrator is both super creepy and clearly brought to you by the same minds that created tentacle rape pr0n.
Says you.
"Recent research conducted by independent investigators concerning the relationship between crime and narcotic (primarily heroin) addiction has revealed a remarkable degree of consistency of findings across studies. The major conclusion supported by the majority of these studies is that narcotic addicts commit a vast amount of crime and that much of this is directly related to the need to purchase drugs. A large proportion of the crimes committed does not consist merely of drug sales or possession, but involves other criminal behaviors including serious crimes. The strongest evidence of a causal relationship between narcotic drug use and crime is derived from longitudinal studies in which the amount of crime committed during periods of active addiction far exceeds that committed during periods of nonaddiction."
http://journals.lww.com/jonmd/Abstract/1985/02000/The_Criminality_of_Narcotic_Addicts.6.aspx
You mean his mom's basement, right?
A gin in the hand is worth two in the bottle.
The Xbox One does not use the same architecture as the 360, the 360 (and PS3) uses the PowerPC architecture which isn't used much any more. The Xbox One and the PS4 both utilize x86 architecture. The only thing the Xbox One and 360 have in common hardware-wise is use of a smaller secondary cache of RAM that is faster than standard memory. The Kinect costs around $75 to manufacture and even if they cut the price down $399 for a system that didn't include the Kinect they would be loosing over $20 on every system sold (The Xbox One base system costs more to make than PS4 base system) Microsoft messed up big time as they are stuck with the system that costs more to make but offers less power than its major competitor (PS4)..
It's the type and placement of ads that makes all the difference.
The PS4 has no ads on the main screen (I just checked). The ads they have in the store are for games and other things the store offers (such as DLC and movies). This is expected and reasonable.
On the 360 (I don't have an Xbone, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's the same way), Microsoft was well-known for placing large ads on the main screen. These ads would more often than not be for non-gaming items, such as Mountain Dew.
If you can't convince them, convict them.