Poor MS, they’re desperate for Kinect to NOT be a massive failure, You probably already got the article where MS tried to prove that Kinect was a better value than Wii +Balance Board and Sony + Move and it’s just getting sad. So much now that they obviously bribed some poor schumck at the Escapist to write this patheitic article.
Now it’s just getting sad. He’s trying to claim that this is more fun or different from the Wii but fails to offer any sort of reason as to why anyone would want to buy it. What games would the expanded audience be interested in on Kinect that they don’t already have on the Wii which is cheaper. What’s really sad in all this is watching the downfall of Rare who once rivaled Nintendo in making creative, fun games, and now reduced to making HD versions of existing Wii games.
If I were Microsoft I’d start looking for a place in New Mexico to dump all their unsold eyetoys.
A fun product doesn’t need essays to explain why it is fun. It either is fun or it is not.
Ironically, the Xbox 360 audience was very accepting of the Wii when it launched (remember the Wii60 movement?). Even Peter Moore got behind it.
All the hostility is not against the Wii but about the bland blatant profit seeking low quality games of ‘casual gaming fallacy’.
In order for a video game to truly sell, it needs to have some sort of quality to it. The Casual Gaming myth has messed this up. The Industry believes the Wii games like Wii Sports are not quality products but crappy products with good marketing or crappy products but with high value to the customers.
When all is said and done, when you look back at a game like Wii Sports (released in 2006), you think to yourself, “That really was a well made game for its time.” It was so well made that other video game companies imitated it but could never duplicate it no matter how many ‘party games’ they came out with.
When Kinect goes down in flames, I hope the Casual Gaming Fallacy goes with it. When E.T. came out, it was because Atari thought everyone would buy the game because of the ‘value’ it contained (it being a license from a huge hit movie) and not the quality of the game.
E.T. and 2600 Pac-Man are the paramount examples of a game company thinking ‘value’ sold games, not the ‘quality’. Atari paid for it dearly. The ‘Casual Gaming Industry’, including Kinect, follows in their footsteps.
Above: Bad quality? Didn’t matter. The home version of ‘Pac-Man’ meant ‘value’. This was what the video game execs thought at Atari. It was a very costly mistake that non-gaming execs still make today.
