Did anyone else find it interesting that Microsoft’s Phil Spencer (who looks an awful lot like Bill Compton the Vampire from True Blood if you look at his picture for long enough) implied a division between Kinect users and gamers in a recent interview with GameSpot?
GS: … When are we going to see some core games for Kinect?
PS: … I think our [Kinect] launch lineup is strong. It's deep. I think it's great seeing the third parties step up. But our gamer customers should expect to see Kinect across all genres. All genres will support Kinect at some point.
“Our gamer customers?” As opposed to the non-gamer customers purchasing the Kinect?
One could argue that Spencer meant to say “our hardcore gamer customers,” as the general wisdom (and sales plan) is that Kinect will sell to the same casual gamers that embraced the Wii, Facebook, and iPhone gaming, but I subscribe to the school of thought that says even if someone’s language is a slip, it’s still telling you something valuable, especially when there’s corroborating evidence.
For years we’ve heard about the Nintendo Wii bringing new gamers into the fold by removing certain accessibility concerns, namely the life skills of controller use that traditional gamers had been building upon for up to three decades, depending on when they joined the club. I never thought of these people as “non-gamers,” but rather as “people who would love to game but are intimidated by control pads.”
When I see Kinect units being given away on Oprah, however, I have to raise an eyebrow and wonder whether Microsoft is banking on opening up an entirely new customer base, rather than catering to an existing market. Kotaku posted about Kinect appearing on the Home Shopping Network. The “Mom to Mom” Kinect trailer is sickly-sweet. It’s almost as though Microsoft is about to attempt the creation of a third gaming market. We’ll have Hardcore, Casual, and Soccer Mom gamers.
“And it’s so easy, anyone can jump in and play!” announces the Mom to Mom trailer host, dressed so perfectly in muted colors and makeup so as to not appear threatening in any way. She also wants to convince me that Kinect will allow us to interact with “games and entertainments in the most natural way possible, using your body and voice.” At PAX Prime this year I tried the water rafting portion of Kinect Adventures and it was anything other than natural. I’d go so far as to say it felt decidedly alien, but then again I’ve been gaming for three decades with traditional input devices.
The ad campaign for Kinect is going to ramp up considerably prior to its November release date, and we’ll see whether the ad buys continue in this vein, but attempting to create an entirely new class of gamer, and hence an entirely new market, might not be such a bad idea. The casual audience has been served extremely well over the past couple of years between the Wii, Facebook, Nintendo DS, and the iPhone. With four different platforms and a robust offering of games for each, there’s certainly an argument to be made that the casual gamer has little impetus to purchase an Xbox 360 if they don’t already own one, and especially if they already own a Wii. Targeting Moms who don’t know from video games by presenting them with what is arguably the safest-looking interface ever, and tying it to their home entertainment system to create an opportunity to give the Joneses something to keep up with, could make for gangbuster holiday sales.
In January of 2011, I’m going to be bemoaning the lack of raw, hard data regarding video game sales. If "gamer customers" are one potential market for the Kinect, I’m really curious as to who the other purchasers will be, and how many of them actually fit any description of “gamer” that we would recognize. And for the record, more power to Microsoft if most of the Kinect’s early adopters actually are soccer Moms. The more people who game, the better for all of us.
Dennis Scimeca is a freelance writer from Boston, MA. He has written for The Escapist, is currently penning features for Gamasutra and @Gamer magazine, and maintains a blog at punchingsnakes.com.