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It looks like Microsoft is still in denial when it comes to Kinect, once again reaffirming that the Xbox peripheral is not dead and even going as far as to say that there are games in the works that make use of the device, although none of them made their debut at E3.
At Microsoft's E3 this year, Kinect was not mentioned once, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, after all, the peripheral never really took off with the serious gaming crowd. However, apparently Microsoft's voice and movement controlled peripheral is not dead in the water.
Speaking with Gamespot at E3 last week, Xbox executive, Aaron Greenberg said: “we are absolutely continuing to support Kinect”. He also said that Microsoft is still trying to “innovate” with the device although in a different way compared to past tactics.
Now Microsoft is only supporting Kinect “where it makes sense”, which is probably the best tactic as it has become obvious that the core gamers are never really going to be interested in the device at this point.
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KitGuru Says: Microsoft spend a ton of money developing the Kinect so I get why it doesn't want to abandon the peripheral completely. It may still work well for more causal games, which it seems Microsoft is going for now, having stopped trying to force Kinect functionality in to core titles.
“It looks like Microsoft is still in denial when it comes to Kinect”.
Actually, it looks like you’re the one in denial about it, writing such uninformed insinuations instead of actually doing your research and seeing there are more than a dozen Xbox One Kinect games and a thriving development community around the Kinect SDK.
Not really. It didn’t exactly take off as they expected and still hasn’t really caught on past cool looking
experimental uses and basic voice/gesture commands in games (oh, and Just Dance). Lets be honest they’ve been trying to boost the Kinects usefulness for a long time now, funding kinect based indie projects and trying to make its use more mainstream in the triple-A market but you can factually see it’s just not happening the way they intend it to.
More than a dozen isn’t a lot (and as far as I’m aware there are only like five games that require kinect), and more importantly, we should be looking at new games coming out not older ones. When you say there’s a ‘thriving community’ around the Kinect SDK, what do you mean? As far as I understood it, there wasn’t really a community at all.
Games on Xbox One that are fully Kinect compatible: Xbox Fitness, Fighter Within, Zumba Fitness World Dance Party, Just Dance 2014, Kinect Sports Rivals, Dance Central Spotlight, Dark Dreams Don’t Die, Boom Ball Kinect, Rabbids Invasion, Shape Up, Just Dance 2015, Fantasia, Blue Estate, Fruit Ninja Kinect 2, and Slice Zombies.
And that doesn’t even include titles that use Kinect in some way (Zoo Tycoon, Project Spark, Forza Horizon 2, Dead Rising 3, Ryse, Tomb Raider, FIFA 14, FIFA 15, etc.)
By ‘thriving community’ I mean there are a ton of developers right now using the Kinect SDK to do mind-blowing work: assisting surgeons, aiding in physical therapy of stroke victims, facilitating learning retention in schools, turning surfaces into ‘touch’ screens, providing real-time sign language translation for deaf people, color painting on 3D printing models, heart rate monitoring, pairing it up with VR to offer more immersion, conducting symphonies in real-time, and literally hundreds, if not thousands of more applications.
Like I said, “cool looking experimental features”. The Kinect 2 is a great product. It can track full body movement down to the fingertips, detect depth and generate the background objects in the room (did you see that experimental video expanding the screenspace using the Kinect and a projector?) and a ton of other features if it’s programmed to. But as much as Microsoft would like it to it doesn’t have an effective place in the games industry – the only area Microsoft are bothering to push it
Ok, so here’s the breakdown:
2013 – 5 games, most announced at release and MS studios.
2014 – 7 – a few MS studios. These games consist of a few dance and fitness games, a sports game, a TV show (rabbids), arcade games, and a single on-rails shooter, Blue Estate, which is multi-plat and much better on the PC.
2015 – 3 games. Fruit Ninja, a very basic arcade game, Slice Zombies, likewise, and Dark Dreams Don’t Die, which is multi-plat and better on the PC (less buggy, fewer restrictions, and better/easier controls).
Overall, 7 of the 15 games are dance and fitness based. At least one is a rerelease of last gen console game and the majority are multi-platform games, so not designed specifically for kinect (e.g. the dance centrals). Many of them are MS studios, as none of the large game dev companies are working on kinect games. The only game that isn’t some sort of fitness or arcade game, i.e. Blue Estate, bombed on XB1 and is much better on the PC without the kinect – in fact, many of the games you listed were very unpopular or poorly rated. Most of them, like boom ball and slice zombies are tiny little micro-games. So this is really worrying. There are effectively no mainstream games using the Kinect properly. They’re very specific and niche genres that generally don’t appeal to mainstream gamers.
As for those other games, you can’t reasonably include them. FIFA, for instance, has no motion control at all. It just has voice controls, which are clunky and few people use. This isn’t using the Kinect. I have voice aspects on GTA V on my PC – why is this a Kinect feature? You could do it with a headset. No, occasional passive support of this kind is not evidence that the Kinect is alive and well.
As for your other examples, well they’re complex. The first thing to say is that this is a whole different arena to gaming. The article was clearly meaning Kinect gaming is dead. The ps3 is still being used in computer clusters, but that’s a different thing to claiming that it’s still a modern and current console. Moreover, the Kinect used in surgery is (as far as I’ve found) the 360, first gen Kinect, for Windows, not the XBO. The sign language stuff is cool. It’s also a University funded research project, not an organic dev team. As far as I can see, the Corel attempt at 3d model skinning was available in beta in 2013 and cancelled in 2014. There are a few other things about 3d modelling but mostly from around 2012, like Fusion. The Kinect stock monitors your heartrate, as far as I’m aware, so that’s no new development. The symphony stuff is the only newer thing and that’s again Kinect for PC (as they all are). So almost all of those things you listed are from around 2013. There’s nothing from after that apart from the symphony. And as I said, these are all Kinect for Windows, using the SDK as you say, rather than Kinect for Xbox. That’s a bit of a different ball-game.
The Will proved that lots of people will buy hardware for one genre of games (motion-controlled) and that there is an audience for it. Microsoft just does a terrible job of marketing Kinect even when they get some real gems in there (Fantasia is superb, Xbox Fitness is great, Dance Central is fun, and Fruit Ninja Kinect 2 may be the best casual party game ever).
Most of those games are not from Microsoft Studios, actually.
Blue Estate is not better on PC: it’s definitely better with Kinect, which is exclusive to the Xbox One version.
Fruit Ninja Kinect 2 is not a “very basic arcade game”; it actually has a lot of various modes of play and, with a simple concept and four-player multiplayer, makes it one of the best casual party games of all time.
Dark Dreams Don’t Die is also not better on PC: it’s definitely better with Kinect, especially the action sequences. I’ve played it three times, with Kinect, with a controller, and with a mouse and keyboard. Kinect is by far the most immersive of the three.
Dance games are different than fitness games, so it’s weird you’re trying to lump them together. Furthermore, what’s wrong with dance games or fitness games? They both have their place.
What would you define as a mainstream game? Kinect Sports Rivals (e.g. bowling) or Fruit Ninja Kinect 2 is about as mainstream of a game as you can get. Most popular non-Kinect games are not mainstream, except for maybe Minecraft, which is the exception to every rule.
Most of the stuff I listed is not from 2013. It’s within the past year. And there is no separate SKU for Kinects on Xbox or Windows anymore. It’s the same SKU. With Windows 10 coming to Xbox One, it’s all getting merged together.
….All time hit the kitguru Find Here
I gave you dates for those. Look them up yourself – in 2015 we’ve only had three of those games.
Look at the reviews for Blue Estate on each. It was a critical and user rated failure on XBO and a critical and user rated success on PC. People who’ve played both say the PC version is much better, and partly because the Kinect controls just don’t work as well as a mouse or controller. It’s a very similar story with Dark Dreams Don’t Die. It’s cool if you enjoyed it more with the Kinect but the reality of the situation is that the vast majority of other people didn’t.
Dance and fitness games just don’t interest the vast majority of gamers. My wife plays them, and my buddies’ wife plays them, but neither of us are the slightest bit interested in playing them. By mainstream games I mean like the Witcher, Gears of War, GTA V, MGS, and so on. The AAA games made by the AAA studios that get the good sales. The games you listed above have their place, I agree, but their place is very niche. MS designed the Kinect to be at the centre stage of XBO development, and in reality it hasn’t changed from the 360. Tomb Raider gets closest to that, but it falls short because of the bare bones support for the Kinect compared to the peripheral support on the ps4, with the Vita and so on.
I ignored your dates because there were errors in them (e.g. Dark Dreams Don’t Die is from 2014, Blue Estate is from 2015, etc.), which suggests you don’t actually know what you’re talking about and have never even played those games via Kinect. And this is my biggest pet peeve with anti-Kinect “gamers”: most of them have never even used it but just bash it anyway.
Google sucks and got surpassed by Bing years ago. If you want an accurate chronology of Kinect innovations, visit the official blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/kinectforwindows/
The grand majority of reviews for the console version of Blue Estate is for the PS4 version (which was awful and which is probably what you looked at, given that you thought the game released in 2014 on Xbox One, which it didn’t). The Xbox One version didn’t receive reviews by most major gaming sites because of how old the game is and how biased gaming sites are against Kinect, but with adding in extra modes, extra content, and motion-controls via Kinect, the few X1 reviews for Blue Estate that do exist declare it the most superior version. I’ve played it with a mouse and keyboard, with a controller, and with a Kinect. Kinect works great and is much more immersive. Same goes for D4. Playing it with a controller or mouse and keyboard is generic in comparison to the immersive voice and gesture controls provided by Kinect–particularly for the action sequences.
I can list dozens of genres that don’t interest “the vast majority of gamers”: in fact, none of them do. Every genre is niche. The titles you list as “mainstream” are not mainstream. Even GTA V, the best-selling game on that list, never achieved anywhere near a majority attachment rate on any platform it was released on. Dance Central actually has similar attachment rates than Metal Gear Solid does.
>I ignored your dates
Come on. I swapped them around by accident. It makes no difference to anything in statistical terms. Look them up for yourself. I guess I should just ignore your entire post post there are grammatical errors (including the obvious double superlative), right? Perhaps we should ignore all witness testimony and historical documents because they’ve got errors in too? You can’t simply ignore inconvenient data. It doesn’t work that way if you’re actually interested in reality rather than post-purchase (or investment) rationalisation.
I own a Kinect, and several games for it, not that this makes any difference.
I looked at the MS blog. The problem is, we’re assessing the impact of Kinect here. The MS blog is not a good place to assess that – it’s basic source evaluation. You don’t pick a source like that. However, I looked at it anyway. It’s also not date-sensitive, hence why I said most of those things were from 2013: MS blog is reporting on them now, but they aren’t new. It gives the impression of a thriving community, which is in their interests, but in reality it’s filling the space, which is quite literally someone’s job. That’s exactly why you don’t rely on something like that as your sole source.
I looked at the reviews of the XBO Blue Estate online. I looked at Metacritic, and the reviews there, and at the reviews on Google. They specifically criticised the motion control for its imprecision, lack of control, and low skill level. By contrast, it currently has a 94% user rating on steam. You keep saying the word ‘immersive’, but not actually quantifying it. Clearly, users prefer the quantifiable advantages of control, difficulty, precision, and speed over unquantifiable terms like ‘immersive’ (‘generic’, or ‘cinematic’ would be other examples of meaningless terms unless otherwise defined).
>Dance Central actually has similar attachment rates than Metal Gear Solid does
You are obviously sidestepping the point, partly by dwelling on semantics. The meaning of mainstream is a digression that isn’t necessary. We’re talking about common appeal. Different demographics like different things – obviously – but that’s exactly the point. The Kinect was not, according to MS, meant to be limited to the 360 realm of dance, fitness, and arcade games. It was meant to be the central feature. However, it hasn’t moved beyond these games at all, and it hasn’t permeated the other genres. Talking about majority attachment rates is a red herring – no game would fit that criterion and *you know it*.
You need to stop rationalising and look at the bigger picture. The Kinect is very far from what MS said. For the vast majority of gamers, the Kinect isn’t on their minds at all. Heck, for the majority of XBO gamers the Kinect is nothing more than a fancy remote.
“Microsoft just does a terrible job of marketing Kinect…”
Frankly, that’s the most RIDICULOUS thing I’ve heard you say so far. Microsoft marketed the heck out of Kinect and only finally pulled away from it when it was clear pushing the bundled Kinect at a higher price was killing sales.
They demoed the TV and interface functionality by hand/voice and even I was interested in that feature.
So Microsoft spent loads of money on marketing, but the consumers spoke with their wallets and weren’t buying Kinect titles (despite it being a bundled hardware) and many were going to PS4 just because of the cheaper price.
There are no grammar errors in my post. Yes, witness testimony that is found to contain errors is ignored. Don’t equate false data with inconvenient data. That’s disengenuous.
The MS blog provides a list of various ways in which Kinect has led to innovation. The blog is absolutely date sensitive. Every post is dated and refers to things done recently or that are still in development.
Metacritic is statistically meaningless, as are Steam user ratings, and I already explained to you that Google is an untrustworthy source (apparently you’re unaware that they are being raked across the coals by the EU for monopolistic practices stemming from manipulating their search results).
“Clearly, users prefer the quantifiable advantages of….”
This is a fallacy. You don’t have statistically representative samples to make those claims. Immersion means “more realistic”, and there is nothing “generic” about it. Playing a dance game with a controller is not as immersive as playing one where you are actually dancing. Controllers, keyboards, and mice do not equate with real life. Moving your hand like you’re holding a gun, dancing a jig, or slapping someone in the face, however, do.
“The meaning of mainstream is a digression that isn’t necessary. We’re talking about common appeal”.
It’s not a digression at all. You’re argument against Kinect is that it’s not “mainstream”, but that’s actually an argument against every genre of games. Nothing is mainstream (and, in fact, the closest thing to mainstream would be a Kinect game like bowling in KSR). You’re lecturing me about semantics and all you did was just replace the word “mainstream” with the words “common appeal”?
“Talking about majority attachment rates is a red herring – no game would fit that criterion and *you know it*”.
It’s not a red herring: it’s the point. Dismissing Kinect for not being mainstream is a fallacy that every genre fails.
“You need to stop rationalising and look at the bigger picture. The Kinect is very far from what MS said.”
Kinect is central and integral to my entertainment experiene: I use it for everything: powering on my Xbox, IR blasting on my TV and set-top box, voice and gesture navigation that frees me from using anachronistic technology like remotes or controllers, Skyping in 1080p with auto-digital zoom, signing me in automatically via facial recognition, allowing me to play a variety of games, streaming with an inset on Twitch, etc. Just because not everyone in the gaming world does that too doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist. It exists. Kinect has become exactly what Microsoft promised it to be. That it doesn’t translate perfectly to every genre of games is another fallacy, demonstrated by the fact that it is better for some genres of games that controllers are inferior to (imagine that–it has a place).
They marketed the heck out of the original Kinect, and the result was the fastest-selling consumer electronics device of all time.
They did not market the Kinect 2 at all, save for a few launch commercials that showed some features (but no Kinect games). There have been no marketing campaigns for their best Kinect 2 games (Dance Central Spotlight, Dark Dreams Don’t Die, Fantasia, etc.); they have only included it in 1 of the 6 bundles they’ve launched since August 2014. The standalone SKU launched in November 2014 with no marketing campaign, cannot be found on any store shelves, and has been out of stock more often than in stock, even at the Microsoft Store. Phil Spencer refused to use the word “Kinect” at E3 2014, Gamescom 2014, and E3 2015, and Kinect is never featured in any console displays anymore. They have completely failed to market Kinect 2 since Phil Spencer took over.
Most casual consumers–the ones who would be most likely to buy Kinect–don’t even know that games like Fantasia or Fruit Ninja Kinect 2 even exist. This is Microsoft’s fault. You can’t buy a product you don’t even know exists.
Woah, that was an extreme @55 kicking, good job James, now I know bloviator boy was full of it.
There are plenty of grammatical and other syntax errors in your post – from your double superlative to your incorrect use of your/you’re – and my point is that they don’t mean anything. That’s simply not the way evidence works. No witness testimony is perfect – there has never been a single case in which the witness testimony was completely without error. If we discarded every piece of evidence that had some errors, we wouldn’t have a single piece of historical evidence about world up until about the Enlightenment period. The data I presented is not false, and I wasn’t equating it with inconvenient data. I was saying that you ignoring it was because you found the data to be inconvenient, which is a different thing.
So, let me get this straight. You think that the Microsoft blog is a trustworthy and objective source on the impact of *one of their own products*? You don’t see how there might be a slight conflict of interests there? Just a teeny one? And you think that google, an independent search engine, are somehow filtering out all of the recent positive kinect articles? Let me guess, you also think that jet fuel can’t melt steel beams, right? And metacritic, which contains a bunch of reviews from independent sources, is meaningless? For what reason? It’s just an easy hub for finding reviews. Steam user ratings, from 200+ users are also meaningless? Cool, I guess.
You should look up the meaning of ‘fallacy’ – it’s not a general use term for ‘wrong’ or ‘I disagree’. And the only reason you can claim that I don’t have the data to back that up is because you’ve just discounted all of that data for no justifiable reason. If by immersive you mean more realistic then I’d argue that holding something, whatever that thing is, and having a type of trigger for shooting is vastly more realistic that simply waving your hands in the air. After all we’re talking about a gun with a trigger here, not magic spells. That was my point about vagueness. It’s entirely subjective.
Kinect is a niche product. Let’s avoid the semantics of mainstream or common appeal. The Kinect only has appeal to certain niche parts of the market. It is not the be all and end all product, for use in all genres and games that MS sold it as. It’s cool that you make wide use of it, but you are not representative of gamers in general. Gamers in general just do not make wide use of the kinect.
Everything is a niche product. So what? Furthermore, Microsoft never said it was going to completely replace the controller in all genres of games. Don’t be daft. Neither can a controller replace Kinect in all genres of games. Ergo, both have their place. People should respect the variety that Kinect brings instead of disparaging it like condescending jerks.
Having addresssed that, don’t lose sight of the face that it’s a digression: messing up key dates is not equivalent to a grammatical error.
“The data I presented is not false”.
Yes, it was. You wrote the wrong years of release for two key games crucial to the discussion.
“You think that the Microsoft blog is a trustworthy and objective source”.
Yes, of course it is. It’s nothing but a news feed. Each of those projects can be individually verified elsewhere. Are you suggesting that Microsoft is fabricating stories about Kinect? That’s a damning claim and you better have actual evidence to suggest that’s true, otherwise you’re at risk of libel.
“And you think that google, an independent search engine, are somehow filtering out all of the recent positive kinect articles”.
Clearly they are if you couldn’t find them using Google and I could find them using Bing. And it’s not me who thinks that Google is manipulating search results: they’re under fire right now by the EU for their criminal practices of doing just that.
“And metacritic, which contains a bunch of reviews from independent sources, is meaningless? For what reason”.
For a ton of reasons. They take reviews from a variety of unvetted sites, subjectively weight some of them to carry more clout than others, manipulate review scores to fit into their subjectively determined global rating system, and the list goes on. It’s statistically meaningless. Same goes for Steam user ratings. Trust me. This is what I do for a living.
I don’t need to look up the definition of ‘fallacy’. I know exactly what it means and have studied logic.
“If by immersive you mean more realistic then I’d argue that holding something, whatever that thing is, and having a type of trigger for shooting is vastly more realistic that simply waving your hands in the air”.
You ‘wave a gun in the air’ to aim it. You don’t move a mouse or an analog stick. The more immersive experience provided by Kinect is much less subjective with other examples that your ignored (e.g. D4: actually making a slapping motion to slap someone in the face via Kinect vs. using a controller or keyboard and mouse to do it). You are seriously arguing that making a slapping motion with your arm is more immersive than flicking a stick is “subjective”? I’d like to meet the person that somehow thinks flicking a stick more realistiically equates with slapping than actually making a slapping motion.
“Kinect is a niche product…It is not the be all and end all product, for use in all genres and games that MS sold it as.”
Everything is a niche product. So what? Furthermore, Microsoft never said it was going to completely replace the controller in all genres of games. Don’t be daft. Neither can a controller replace Kinect in all genres of games. Ergo, both have their place. People should respect the variety that Kinect brings instead of disparaging it like condescending jerks. You keep talking about gamers, “in general,” without realizing you don’t speak for gamers, “in general”. No one does. Celebrate diversity.
Except that it wasn’t; it was full of canards.
To be honest, I think your comment is daft enough to stand for itself. Have yourself a nice day.
Don’t confuse logic with daftness. Doing so is daft.
Again, you really need to look up the meaning of things like ‘logic’ and ‘fallacy’. They aren’t general use terms. I didn’t give your comment a detailed reply because you don’t actually make any arguments beyond the ones I already responded to, and making excuses for ignoring my points.
I’m a logician. I understant what a fallacy is more than just about anyone else on this planet. Do you need me to walk you through your fallacies one by one? Deconstruct them so that you understand why?
Some of my points you responded to, which I rebutted. Others, despite my repeated asking (e.g. expounding on your accusations of grammar errors), you’ve ignored.
If you feel I’ve ignored any of your points that are worthy of a response (it was hard to sift through all the digressions and non-sequiturs), re-state them succinctly and I’ll address them.
You’re not a logician, buddy. Don’t pretend to be things you aren’t on the internet because honestly, it’s blindly obvious that you’re a (likely pre-college age) kid.
You can argue I’ve made mistakes if you like, but there are no fallacies there. I know my fallacies – that’s what seven years of a University education in the humanities gets you, even if it doesn’t get you that much else. It also gives you a great nose for sniffing out frauds. I’ve never met a logician (or an academic in general) who would claim global expertise on any issue or topic. Or for that matter, one who can’t define or tell the difference between fallacy, invalid premises, unsound arguments, and logic. If you’re interested in logic then you’d do well to look these up rather than bandying them about. On that point, look up non-sequitur while you’re there. I do digress at points, but there’s not a single conclusion that doesn’t follow up there. Note that it’s not a non-sequitur if you choose to undermine the authority of my premises or evidence. That’s not the way it works. Again, I can only suggest you look these terms up.
I didn’t ignore you. I responded (both times), but it seems that you didn’t understand my answer. Let me explain my example in more depth – that is, the example aside from the more obvious your/you’re one that you seem to have forgotten – because it’ll be useful for you to know when you get to University. You said: “the few X1 reviews for Blue Estate that do exist declare it the **most superior** version.” ‘Most superior’ is what is known as a ‘double superlative’. A superlative is an absolute that is used to denote that a thing has a value to the greatest possible degree. So, something that is ‘superior’ cannot be ‘most superior’, because that’s a double superlative, and English syntax simply does not allow this. A good comparison would be saying ‘more emptiest’ or ‘most best’. I don’t have time to pick out every mistake you made and give you a lesson on each, and frankly I don’t care enough to either.
The obvious truth, and the only natural conclusion of our discussion, is that the Kinect is a niche product. You’ve agreed with this. It has its place, and its place is small. There isn’t a large dev community or much active development going on right now for the XBO.
I can find no instances of mixing up “your” with “you’re,” or vice versa, so I’d appreciate you specifically pointing them out like you finally did with your accusation of using a double superlative (but, if such an error does exist, it would clearly be a typographical error, not a true grammatical error stemming from ignorance, and thus, not of too much concern to me).
To address your concrete example, superior is not a superlative. It’s an adjective meaning “of higher grade or quality”. It does not mean it is of the highest (<– this is a superlative) grade or quality, only that it is of higher (<– this is not a superlative) grade or quality than what it is being compared to. Ergo, "most superior" is not a double superlative; it's a superlative.
I'm a logician. You telling me I'm not and then claiming you didn't commit any fallacies just makes you look foolish. I know what fallacies are, and you're guilty of them. Here's one:
"I looked at the reviews of the XBO Blue Estate online. I looked at Metacritic, and the reviews there, and at the reviews on Google. They specifically criticised the motion control for its imprecision, lack of control, and low skill level. By contrast, it currently has a 94% user rating on steam".
This is a fallacy. You are drawing conclusions about something by appealing to statistically unrepresentative data. There are many more instances like this in your post.
Everything in the gaming industry is a niche product. Niche products, especially innovative ones that help disadvantaged groups, don't deserved to be bashed, particularly by people who condescendingly dismiss it they personally don't use it.
Phil Spencer made some smart choices then. Good riddance to the Kinect parasite. How’s your one-handed brother doing?