According to Microsoft, the Xbox platform is performing surprising well considering how long its current hardware has been in the market. More specifically, the Xbox Live continues to gain subscribers at a high rate. What can the company attribute such success to? The Kinect of course!
“The last twelve months has been our biggest in terms of acquisition [of new LIVE members] – in the EMEA region and globally… And we’re actually forecasting the next 12 months to be even bigger,” said Microsoft Xbox Head of Product Marketing, Robin Burrowes.
The overall Xbox platform, which includes the Xbox 360 and Xbox Live, continues to grow popular and make Microsoft some nice revenue all thanks to the Kinect. More and more users have subscribed to Xbox Live because of the Kinect and Microsoft thinks that it will only continue to grow. Back in March of 2011, Microsoft announced that the company had sold 10 million Kinect units overall since it launched in November of 2010.
New users will tend to create a Live account when purchasing a Xbox/Kinect bundle and so will those who purchased the Kinect to see what it is all about, only to end up loving it. So its no surprise that the Kinect has been a total success for Microsoft.
Microsoft continues to enhance the Xbox experience by introducing new features to the Kinect. Recently, Microsoft announced the Kinect Avatar, which allows a gamer to personalize their Kinect avatar to interact with other gamers. This new feature utilizes the Kinect camera to track a gamer’s facial expressions and display them on the avatar.
Not to be outdone, Microsoft also announced the availability of Kinect Sparkler, which lets players use their fingers to draw sparkling lines that whirl glowing, gold stars in front of, behind, and around 3-D photographs of themselves.
“We think these are very interesting and important capabilities for the platform – if you think about gaming, it’s all about making the experience more immersive. Some of this technology may be realized in games farther in the future, but we worked on these Fun Labs projects to offer a compelling, fun and cool experience that we could deliver today, using the power of Kinect.” said Umaimah Mendhro, a Senior Product Manager for Microsoft Startup Business Group.
