14 DAY TRIAL // Common wisdom holds that with the launch of Kinect from Microsoft and PlayStation Move from Sony, the makers of the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3 are aiming to take a chunk out of the market currently dominated by Nintendo with its Wii home console. But recent comments from the most important man at the company show that the Japanese console maker is not too concerned about the prospect and believes its two rivals will have some problems with their fresh motion tracking peripherals.
Satoru Iwata, who is the Chief Executive Officer of Ninendo and the man who seems to do most of the talking about company strategy these days, told VentureBeat in an interview that “Asking consumers to pay more for additional hardware is not ideal. If I were one of the developers for Kinect or Move, I would wonder if Microsoft or Sony would have a large enough installed base of this accessory to justify investment in a game.”
The PlayStation Move will be the first device to arrive in September, with the price starting at 49.99 dollars but approaching 100 in order to get a complete experience or if one does not have a PlayStation Eye camera.
Kinect, which was initially known as Project Natal, will come on November 4 in North America and the pricing seems to be set at 150 dollars. Both Sony and Microsoft have videogames in development at internal studios that use the new motion tracking technologies but one of the biggest publishers, Activision, has said that it will wait to see whether customers like the devices before making sure that all titles have support for them.
Nintendo has suggested that the next home console will expand on the motion tracking system and might also incorporate three-dimensional gaming. The company is not officially talking about a successor for the Wii.