Kinect Scarcity Is Not Microsoft Engineered, Says Executive

A high profile Microsoft executive has stated that the company is not creating any sort of artificial scarcity for its Kinect motion tracking controller ahead of the crucial Christmas shopping season in order to drive up sales afterwards.

In an interview with Gamesindustry.biz Neil Thompson, who is leading the United Kingdom and Ireland operations of Microsoft, has said, “Anyone who actually works in the business of producing new technology, especially hardware technology, will know that these things are never managed.”

He detailed the process which Microsoft went through to choose the launch date for Kinect, saying “The choices you always have are: do we launch in November or do we wait until February, March when we could hit some bigger launch numbers but then we miss Christmas." 

"So you’re always in this fine balance, saying ‘well, we want to give people the product as soon as we can, but you can’t switch on the manufacturing like water.’ It takes time to scale.”

Microsoft chose to launch the Kinect motion tracking device all over the world during the month of November and that could have put some strain on their manufacturing and their distribution network.

Microsoft has reported that it has managed to sell no less than 2.5 million units of its new Xbox 360 add on in 25 days since it appeared on the North American market.

Kinect is innovative because it allows the player to control a gaming experience or the Xbox 360 interface without needing any physical controller, solely through body and hand motions.

If it is widely adopted and if game developers find new ways to harness its possibilities, Kinect could be looked back on as one of the great innovations of the video game industry.

Until then, the device needs to face competition from the Sony made PlayStation Move device, which is more traditional but has also managed to sell well since it was launched in the middle of September.