[Official] Kinect - Over 4 million units sold!

[DrunknMunky Veteran]

Yeah it's not the only accessory that's MIA right now. Seems it's impossible to buy the external power supply for Kinect for use on original 360's too.

[Sethos]

That isn't included in the box? Rip-off :p

[DrunknMunky Veteran]

nope, they only have one SKU for Kinect. The new 360s are unaffected as they have the fancy port built in to provide power. It's only the old ones that need it.

[Sethos]

I'm so buying a PS3 now!1

[Lexcyn]

Kinect has sold out at ALL of our local stores while the PSMovie has tons of stock left. I'd say Microsoft wins so far, at least locally here.

Boourns for me though as I wanted to grab one for the g/f's xmas gift.

[Hedon]

Yeah it's not the only accessory that's MIA right now. Seems it's impossible to buy the external power supply for Kinect for use on original 360's too.

If for some reason you buy a Kinect Xbox 360 S bundle and then take the Kinect out of the box and decide to hook it up to an OLD Xbox 360 instead, you can buy the power cord from the store.

The Kinect Sensor Power Supply provides power and connectivity to an original Xbox 360 console to make sure you can continue using your Kinect anywhere, anytime. Even if you leave your power supply at a friend's house by mistake, you don't have to worry. You now have a backup power supply.

http://store.microsoft.com/microsoft/Kinect-Sensor-Power-Supply/product/9A4CFC08

[DrunknMunky Veteran]

Yeah but it seems it's only available in the US (and maybe only from MS' store too for that matter).

It's not for sale anywhere here in the UK. Nor do they do int.shipping.

[Hedon]

Yeah but it seems it's only available in the US (and maybe only from MS' store too for that matter).

It's not for sale anywhere here in the UK. Nor do they do int.shipping.

Pfft....**** the UK! :cool:

[DrunknMunky Veteran]

Oh no you didn't....

[spaceelf]

I'm with him on that...but somehow I'm guessing the people in the UK (well most of them) feel differently.

[Unrealistic]

I got a Kinect. Absolutely love Dance Central as well (and so does the girlfriend). :)

[Livin in a box]

Are there not any PSU's on eBay?

[DrunknMunky Veteran]

Are there not any PSU's on eBay?

No, and even if there was they'd be exports from the US.

Besides, gamers shouldn't have to resort to eBay. MS should be shipping them & reaping the profits, not eBay.

[Byron_Hinson]

I got a Kinect. Absolutely love Dance Central as well (and so does the girlfriend). :)

Dance central certainly seems as if it is the most popular launch title. I really enjoy Kinectimals but I found Kinect Adventures too repetitive and over too quickly. Dance Central my wife loves and keeps talking to her friends about it. So good word of mouth should really help with both Kinect and the game

[spaceelf]

I like Kinect Sports most of what I've played. Dancing games...yeah no.

[Hedon]

Kinect doubles UK Xbox sales

Sales of Xbox 360 in the UK doubled last week off the back of the launch of Kinect, Eurogamer has learnt.

The spike was confirmed this afternoon by sales monitor Chart-Track, a spokesperson stating that, while specific figures could not be revealed, it was "more than a fair reflection" to say the figure was double that of the previous week.

The boost is understood to have widened substantially the gap between Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, with Sony's biggest hope for a pre-Christmas surge coming next week with the release of the long-delayed Gran Turismo 5.

A senior publishing source added: "360 doubled last week and it was already selling a lot. Wii and PS3 have been beaten by 360 consistently over the past few months.

"Wii is still outselling PS3 ? the numbers are going the wrong way for Nintendo year-on-year but it's certainly not a disaster."

Kinect went on sale last week both separately and as part of official hardware bundles, the latter likely to be responsible for the jump in numbers.

Microsoft revealed yesterday that over one million units of Kinect has sold worldwide in the ten days following its 4th November US launch.

The US giant reckons it's on track to sell five million units by Christmas.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2010-11-16-kinect-doubles-uk-xbox-sales

dang...

[HawkMan]

So again, we have evidence that the 360 is not only outselling everything in the US, but also massively outselling everything, including the Wii in the UK and has for the last few months. yet somehow there are claims that the PS3 is catching up...

anywway, good job MS. I guess their marketing is working very well. But then it's everywhere, all the time.

[DrunknMunky Veteran]

Kinect is going to destroy Move for the foreseeable future imo.

I was going to make an impulse buy last night for Move but then I was like "there's zero games that interest me". So that plan was scrapped really quickly :p

Microsoft are laughing this xmas. The most consoles sold, the best selling peripheral on the market and the largest lineup of first party titles.

[George P Global Moderator]

Now they have to keep the games coming so this initial strong pop in sales doesn't do a Wii, though, to be honest with all the talk about wii's just collecting dust and stuff it doesn't seem to bother Nintendo. I guess if you sell enough before everyone gets bored it's ok in the end. :laugh:

[Ironman273]

Now they have to keep the games coming so this initial strong pop in sales doesn't do a Wii, though, to be honest with all the talk about wii's just collecting dust and stuff it doesn't seem to bother Nintendo. I guess if you sell enough before everyone gets bored it's ok in the end. :laugh:

It worked for Nintendo... ;)

[Hedon]

A Real Threat Now Faces the Nintendo Wii

THE question can now be asked: Does it make sense to buy a Nintendo Wii anymore?

For four years, there has been no question. No product has been more important than the Wii in leading video games? return to the cultural mainstream. Since its debut in 2006, the Wii has reshaped living room entertainment by making simple, intuitive games accessible to millions of people who never felt comfortable with a typical two-handed game controller covered with buttons and sticks.

For all their sophistication and power, the competing consoles ? the Microsoft Xbox 360 and Sony PlayStation 3 ? have remained largely the province of serious gamers. Neither brand offered the sorts of controls that could truly appeal to a mass audience, and particularly to families that want to have fun together at home.

Until now. Nintendo should feel some heat at the moment, because Microsoft and Sony, which outstrip Nintendo in sheer technical resources, have finally caught up with the Wii?s lead in engineering and its ingenious human interface. Put another way, for almost four years, the Wii offered a unique home entertainment experience. But now, after the introductions this fall of the Move system from Sony for the PS3 and the brilliant Kinect from Microsoft for the Xbox 360, the Wii no longer does anything important that the PS3 or Xbox 360 cannot do even better.

On the one hand (so to speak), the Move basically copies the Wii?s wandlike controller, although it feels slightly more accurate. As with the Wii, you wave the Move?s controller around and swing and twist it in space to bowl or throw or evoke some other action on the screen.

The difference is that the Wii?s graphics, while cute, are of low resolution and inferior detail. The PS3 is a high-definition powerhouse. When you compare golf on the Wii to golf on the PS3 with Move, you realize that there really is no competition. On the Wii, golf looks like a video game. On the PS3, golf looks like a golf course. I cannot wait to see how Sony incorporates the Move into its Major League Baseball series next year. Done properly, it should be as close to standing in the batter?s box and trying to hit a professional curveball as most of us will ever come.

Moreover, the PS3 plays Blu-ray movie discs and can display 3-D images, two things the Wii cannot do. And the PS3 has a full lineup of great traditional games if you want to pick up a real controller. So with the Move, Sony gets zero points for creativity but full marks for successful imitation.

Still, legitimate reasons to buy the Wii remain. Of course, there is price. The Wii costs $200 and now comes with both the Wii Sports and Wii Sports Resort compilations. (A second controller costs around $40.) The PS3 with Move costs twice as much, $400, and comes with only one game compilation, called Sports Champions. A second Move controller costs around $50. The least expensive version of the PlayStation 3, which does not include Move, costs $300.

The other potential reason to buy the Wii is the games available on that system and nowhere else. If playing Mario, Donkey Kong or Zelda games is important to you or yours, the Wii is the only choice. If you must play Disney Epic Mickey, you need a Wii. (Likewise, if you must play Gran Turismo 5 or God of War III, you need a PS3.)

So you have Nintendo and Sony offering comparable controllers rigged to machines with far different technical power and with quite different prices.

Then you have what deserves, as far as I am concerned, to be the technology hit of the year: the Kinect from Microsoft. If you have not heard by now, Kinect takes the concept of the Wii (and the Move) and pursues it to its natural culmination, getting rid of the electronic game controller altogether. The Wii rescued gaming from being in a perpetual niche by introducing a controller that was simple to use. Kinect is driving gaming into the future by literally seeing and listening to you.

Want to highlight a menu item? Wave your hand or just say, ?Xbox, play music,? for example. Want to kick a ball? Kick. Want to bowl? Swing your arm as though you are bowling. That?s it. As with any trailblazing new technology, the right question is, ?Sounds good, but does it really work?? Kinect really works.

And it is obvious that Kinect is just in its infancy. There are a small number of (often compelling) Kinect games amid a sea of traditional, non-Kinect games. But what will happen when developers start incorporating Kinect features like voice recognition into their big-budget titles? I cannot wait to find out. Imagine an adventure game controlled by simply standing and turning and leaning and holding the game?s items on the screen. These things are not going to be easy, but I would be shocked if they do not happen over the next couple of years.

Without Kinect, the least expensive version of the Xbox 360 now costs $200, the same as the Wii. But without Kinect, the Xbox 360 is not competing with the Wii for the affection of mothers and children. With Kinect, the Xbox 360 costs $300 with four gigabytes of storage or $400 with a 250-gigabyte hard drive, which is primarily for those who will download a lot of movies or store a lot of music. Like the PS3, the Xbox 360 can display 3-D. (Very few games support it now, though, and you need a television capable of 3-D and special glasses.) And the Xbox Live Internet service is the class of the console gaming industry.

So the real threat to Nintendo and the Wii is not Sony, it is Microsoft and Kinect. Kinect is even easier to use than the Wii, and it brings your whole body into an electronic entertainment experience in a way that has never existed before.

Does it make sense to buy a Wii anymore? If price really matters or you just need your Nintendo fix, then sure. But there are more innovative and exciting options these days.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/03/technology/personaltech/03KINECT.html

Bold is my emphasis.

[Malisk]

I think the threat depends on how important users deem the game interaction to be. Kinect is even more accessible, yes, and it's a pretty damn cool device, but on the other hand, there's no trigger to press or release, so the entire range of games that relies on this feature to make gamers feel "connected" is out. For example being able to precisely tell when to drop a bowling ball, shift gears, etc -- hundreds of examples, really. The games on Kinect therefore becomes watered out, but on the other hand, more accessible than ever. So it's a mixed blessing in my opinion.

However, marketing and human minds are hard to predict, so less game involvement may be a neglible disadvantage for the Kinect, where people value the approachability more. Personally speaking, I wouldn't buy a Kinect though. For me top accuracy in games is more important than having a cool device which tries to track your body and voice. Heck, I don't even own a Wii for this reason. I prefer gaming on other, more mechanically and immediately human-interface connected, systems. The disadvantage being you can't blame the game system if you suck anymore. ;)

[bob_c_b]

Isn't that why the 360 is really the best choice, plenty of excellent core games with many more on the way, and a totally accessable motion controller?

[Livin in a box]

Got Kinect for my birthday on Friday, enjoying it so far. The achievements on Kinect Adventures are really too easy!

However, it keeps on detecting my brother as a girl on Kinect Adventures. Though if I disappear and make my brother go on first, he'll be a boy and then I'll go on and I'll come up as my own avatar. I've down the Kinect ID's numerous times but sometimes it just refuses to recognise.

Other than that though it's been pretty good. Lag isn't as bad as I thought but it is noticeable when you're jumping. It's also very picky about space, I thought that it would tilt if you were getting too close...Never mind.

Edit: And why is my Gamertag thing below showing Xbox @ E3 for Kinect Adventures I wonder...

[Massiveterra]

2nd player is always a girl for Kimect Adventures