News - Microsoft to unbundle the Xbox One Kinect sensor from 9th June

[Brewster0101]

More interesting articles around on this news about how the reserved GPU and memory reserves could be unlocked without a Kinect - bringing the Xbox one on par with the power of the PS4.

Also Xbox live for £35-£40 per year is just crazy. I do everything for free on my PC, why should people have to pay more on the Xbox's.

[MrCanzine]

At $399 in Canada it's $50 less than the PS4 which raised their price to $449 earlier this year. Rather interesting, perhaps PS4 will lower their price back down (Hopefully Xbox doesn't raise theirs instead)

Having Kinect on all consoles at sale was at least beneficial for studios who may not want to invest time and money in features that may not have as wide a reach, just look at how many games used Kinect for X360, not all that many. Knowing people at least have access to it means they can put in some neat features, and the users can decide whether they want to give it a go (If the features are optional). Now though, while it's still the users choice if they want to have a Kinect or not, they're a lot less likely to go "Oh, this game I'm playing has some Kinect features, I'll try them out." since if they don't already have Kinect, they'd have to be intrigued so much by those features to actually go out and buy the extra peripheral.

May have been better if MS simply dropped the price and took the hit for now and see what happens, as the tech got less expensive to manufacture the loss would have been less over time. Now they have the price to match PS4 but without the Kinect, consumers are still left at a crossroads, with PS4 looking like the more powerful console to most people this "price drop" may simply steer more customers to PS4 instead of fewer. I'm still holding out for actual price drops rather than price drops due to feature removals. I'd also want to see what the Kinect 2.0 on its own will cost. If it were a viable upgrade path, such as paying $399 now and then $99 or $110 later, it may be appealing as it doesn't add extra penalty for not buying the bundle.

[Saracen]

At $399 in Canada it's $50 less than the PS4 which raised their price to $449 earlier this year. Rather interesting, perhaps PS4 will lower their price back down (Hopefully Xbox doesn't raise theirs instead)

Having Kinect on all consoles at sale was at least beneficial for studios who may not want to invest time and money in features that may not have as wide a reach, just look at how many games used Kinect for X360, not all that many. Knowing people at least have access to it means they can put in some neat features, and the users can decide whether they want to give it a go (If the features are optional). Now though, while it's still the users choice if they want to have a Kinect or not, they're a lot less likely to go "Oh, this game I'm playing has some Kinect features, I'll try them out." since if they don't already have Kinect, they'd have to be intrigued so much by those features to actually go out and buy the extra peripheral.

May have been better if MS simply dropped the price and took the hit for now and see what happens, as the tech got less expensive to manufacture the loss would have been less over time. Now they have the price to match PS4 but without the Kinect, consumers are still left at a crossroads, with PS4 looking like the more powerful console to most people this "price drop" may simply steer more customers to PS4 instead of fewer. I'm still holding out for actual price drops rather than price drops due to feature removals. I'd also want to see what the Kinect 2.0 on its own will cost. If it were a viable upgrade path, such as paying $399 now and then $99 or $110 later, it may be appealing as it doesn't add extra penalty for not buying the bundle.

But that's partly what annoys me. In order to boost Kinect take-up rates, to get them to develop for it, MS tried to force users to buy Kinect whether they want it or not, by building it in, and pricing it in. We, the actual customers, are expected to stump up the cash, up-front, and hope games good enough to justify it follow on later.

Also, the fact that several years after Kinect became available for X360, the fact that they have to do this to "encourage" studios ought to tell them something about buyer preferences. After all, if a large proportion of us wanted it, we'd have bought it, or would buy a v2 upgrade.

Or, MS could have taken the hit and built-in the hardware at their cost, then recouped the cost in licencing fees when we all went out and bought all these great, Kinect-utilusing titles. If they had faith it was so good we would all buy it.

This strikes me as typical of the arrogance of an MS that's used to being King of the home computing world, and is struggling to get it's corporate brain around the concept that we don't all jump to MS's tune when it plays. We don't when MS decides to leverage it's mobile hardware device sales by forcing MUI on destop Windows users, and we don't when MS decides it wants to force Kinect on us, want it or not.

[crossy]

More interesting articles around on this news about how the reserved GPU and memory reserves could be unlocked without a Kinect - bringing the Xbox one on par with the power of the PS4.

If true, then it sounds like someone @Microsoft screwed up. After all, it does lead to the (farcical?) situation where you either use the system "as designed" and accept the performance hit, or ditch Kinect to get the extra performance and end up missing those much touted features. Madness, utter madness.

Also Xbox live for £35-£40 per year is just crazy. I do everything for free on my PC, why should people have to pay more on the Xbox's.

PS+ is about the same cost (according to Tesco) so I can't see what the big objection is. Yes, you can multiplayer on PC "for free", but I thought that the justification for XBL and PS+ were that you not only got "better" server availability, but also got incidentals thrown in - like XBL's free-game-a-month deal.

What I will agree with though is that console gaming is no longer the "cheap" option - with consoles that are hitting the pricing of a low-end PC, more expensive games and "mandatory"* service schemes. I think that the previous gen consoles were definitely a better value proposition.

(* yes, I know you CAN go MP without PS+)

[VijaySathyan]

Should have done this from the start Microsft. Oh well, better late than never.

[csgohan4]

for 350 good ones, I could get aa decent Nvidia/ ATI card and still be pleased with the graphics. There isn't a need to upgrade from Sandybridge at this time, so win win for PC gaming.