14 DAY TRIAL // Specialist retailer GameStop has said that both recently launched motion tracking systems, the Kinect from Microsoft and the PlayStation Move from Sony, are bringing in a lot of new customers, who might not have been interested in gaming until now, and will continue to sell well despite the fact that stores might temporarily be out of stock.
Tony Bartel, who is the president of GameStop, has told investors in his company that all customers should expect to see supply issues for both the Kinect and the Move in the coming months, mostly just before Christmas.
He said, “We definitely do see a new customer coming into our stores. And it is selling hardware as well.”
He added, “Kinect Sports and Dance Central - they're definitely the expanded-audience type games, and those are attaching extremely well.”
Still it seems that the buzz around Kinect and Move is not as big as that generated by the initial launch of the Nintendo Wii home console, the first one to have motion tracking, which lead to situations where ”we had customers following the UPS truck to our stores.”
Bartel says that he is hopeful that the same situation will appear with the new motion tracking generation.
Kinect has been launched on November 4 in the United States and can now be bought all over the world, with the main attraction being the lack of any actual physical controller for the player to use.
The Move, which launched in the middle of September, has already managed to sell more than 1 million units in both North America and in Europe.
Both devices will only ultimately succeed if they gain a significant install base early on and if game developers then use them to deliver new interesting games, keeping that player base interested and slowly expanding it.