Official: Kinect set to launch at $150

Microsoft. Xbox Live director of programming Larry Hryb, posted the pricing details Kinect on his Major Nelson blog. The retail price of Kinect will be $150. Including this will be Kinect Adventures which carries retail price at $49. 


In addition to that, there will be a new bundle of Arcade model of new Xbox 360 slim at $199. It will feature 4GB of built-in flash memory and wireless N. Should you want all three of them, you can get the arcade model, Kinect, and Kinect Adventures at $299. 

So if you do the math, the nett Kinect price will be $100, which is an improvement in terms of pricing point. But for casual gamers, it might still become a hurdle for them to pick one.  
The bundle price of Kinect "might" work, only it won't sell like Wii during its first launch when motion control console is still fresh. And the success of Kinect will all depends to the software. I don't think releasing Kinect games that have more or less the same concept of Nintendo's games will cut it. Microsoft will have to be more creative than that. 
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Kinect is too lag for competitive gaming

Lag has been the main issue around Microsoft's no controller Kinect, and it is doubtful if Kinect capable in playing FPS. Turns out it is not. 
Microsoft 's director of platform marketing, Chris Penello more or less confirms it, and said that

Well, I don't want Halo on Kinect. I want Halo on a controller. Now would it be interesting to see what kind of game they could make using Kinect? Yeah, I would love to see what those guys could do, or what the Call of Duty guys could do. But I don't want to play Call of Duty 4, I want Call of Duty: Black Ops on the controller. 

In addition to that, Rare confirms that Kincent lag will be around 150 ms. That means from the time you do your body gesture, Kinect will roughly take 150 ms to process the data and translate it into the game. If you do online play, the number probably should be add 100 ms to communicate with online server. Hence the total amount of time required is 250 ms which is unacceptable.

I think it's wise to separate games that can be Kinected from games that don't. Not all games can be enjoyable with no controller. The success of Kinect will depend on how developer innovate with this thing. As a matter of fact, doing dancing, fitness, and party game won't cut it, they need to integrate it into hardcore gaming and that is a tough task for all developers. The unconfirmed but likely price of $150 a piece doesn't help either.
I begin to see why Nintendo and Sony ditch this technology. Probably it is too ahead its time for competitive gaming. But in the mean time, since it is already here, let's just wait and see. 
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Kinect: early impression. Good not great..

So we have seen Kinect in action plus all those dancing, fitness games, and others. What are the initial impression?

First of all, Kinect's tag line is to make yourself a controller, means that you can manipulate the games only with your movement. Couple games that are really works with Kinect is Dancing theme games, where the you can do dancing movement and Kinect's camera actually tracks your movements and tells you whats wrong.

Other games are racing games where you control the car with only hand movements, but in the demo you can't actually control the acceleration and brakes which is a big question mark on how you going to do that. But anyway it is the demo, we might see different version later.

The other thing that we need to pay attention is all the Kinect's demo requires people to stand up because Kinect's camera can't distinguish between people sitting down and people bending the knees. As a matter of fact, one Kotaku staff asked whether he can sit down while doing the demo, the answer is no. Kinect works best if people standing up, and they haven't calibrate it yet for sitting down people. I hope that this won't be the case in the final product, because it is really funny if you have to play Xbox 360 standing up all the time. Don't we just love our chair?

And from that point, it is really curious to find out if Kinect camera requires us to see our whole body to be able to detect. Let's say three of your friends comes over and want to play multiplayer, do they need to be in line to each other to play with Kinect? What if the living room is small? Guess we just have to wait until release date and see user experience with Kinect. 

Other thing that is missing is Kinect enable fps based games. I was really interested in finding out what is the response/ lagging time for Kinect to translate the body movement into the game and whether it is capable of playing fps. Other thing is how the person trigger the shoot and move around. I guess I just assume that at the moment, developers hasn't seen Kinect as a capable sole input for fps games.

Now then, retail giants like Amazon, Target put $149 for Kinect. And that is a question mark for casual gamers. Do they really want to spend up to $450 (Xbox 360 slim and Kinect) just to play some dancing, fitness games? Only time will tell. Meanwhile let's just wait and see if there is any changes regarding this Kinect thing.
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New Xbox 360 design and name for Project Natal

The image above was briefly appear on certain website before its taken off. Though its not confirmed (for new design), it can safely assumed that Xbox 360 undergo design change. Whereas for Project Natal, Microsoft officially changed the a slightly weird name to Kinect.

 The rumor for Xbox 360 redesign is already circulating around for quite some times, some even correctly predicted that it will be announced during E3 together with Project Natal considering it is the right moment. From the looks of it, it certainly will come true.

The redesign will feature a 250 GB hard drive and built in Wifi. Like PS3 slim announcement, price cut should follow. I'd predict that the new Xbox 360 cost should be $199.
If it is true, then together with Kinect, Xbox 360 should gained enough momentum to break away from PS3 assault and bring its price closer to Nintendo Wii.
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