With 8m sold, the Kinect is a runaway hit at the shops. Is it the same in your home, though? Are you finding the games inspiring, or a bit... blah?
So here's the Kinect news at last viewing: Microsoft sold 8m in the period from its release to the end of 2010. That made it the fastest-selling-ever piece of consumer electronics kit - outpacing Apple's iPad.
That's a hell of a lot of Kinects. It's not even getting close to a 25% attach rate - there are 50m Xbox 360s out there. Long way to go still.
But what is there to play on Kinect? Not that much, so far - some unpromising retreads such as Dr Kawashima's Body & Brain Exercises, which is basically the Nintendo Brain Training but with the stylus taken out.
Here's the thing. Over Christmas, a friend who's a really enthusiastic gamer (they've got a Wii and an Xbox 360, and play them all the time) got a Kinect in the expectation that it would thrill and fascinate the kids.
Nope. "Two days, tops," he said. "Then they just went back to the old games."
Which I have to say tallies with my own experience: so far my own kids haven't abandoned the Wii for the Kinect. True, they had the Wii first, but my friend's kids had the Xbox 360 first.
Is it just that the Kinect is new? True, the early games on any new platform usually aren't amazing - although, that said, Wii Sports was an amazing breakthrough - tennis! bowling! golf! boxing! - and Super Mario Galaxy is an amazing platformer that uses the capability of the Wii and its controls to the fullest extent.
By contrast, Kinect - while (can we agree?) an amazing piece of technology, including as it does 3D recognition, voice recognition, person recognition, on machines that are five years old, and which doesn't max out the processor (Microsoft says it only uses about 10% of the processing power) - just doesn't have quite the same engagement. If you've played on a Wii, then the Kinect games look very me-too; table tennis, volleyball (though a bit confusing, that one, to be honest) and driving.. yeah, done that.
There's also the space question, which isn't trivial: you need a large room to play Kinect games, because it wants you around 2 metres at least from the sensor/screen, and that can be hard to arrange for many British households.
So here's the $64m question. Are you still using your Kinect? What's good? What's bad? What's the best/worst things about it, now that the glow of ownership and that new equipment smell has worn off?
If you're not playing it any more, what have you gone back (or on) to?
But if you've stuck with it, what's keeping you using it?
And do you think that it's just a matter of time - that it's simply waiting for someone to come up with the really great game format that will have everyone buying and playing?
Cameron Diaz Sofía Vergara Nicole Richie Norah Jones Nicky Hilton
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