Bundles

The Next-Gen Model
Lately I’ve been looking at motion gaming and the conundrum it presents for Playstation and Xbox gamers. The problem being that not everyone owns the peripherals for these consoles. So developers make games and have to make the game playable for everyone who owns a console, but what if this developer makes a feature that specifically uses Kinect or another accessory. So either the developer has to tweak that feature so that people that don't own that peripheral can still play the game. But then that tweak the developer made to game makes playing without the peripheral is an inferior feature. Let’s take the game PlayStation Move Heroes for example, that game takes popular characters that playstation gamers love and makes said consumers go out and buy a playstation move just so they can play this game. This big gaping hole in developers design choices made me start thinking about how the industry could fix this problem. Eventually I came to the conclusion that all that needs to be done is for Sony and Microsoft to make it impossible to buy a console without a Kinect or Move.

That’s why I suspect that Sony and Microsoft will bundle Kinect and Move with the next-gen consoles. When I say bundling, I mean that every single console will come with these peripherals. If Sony and Microsoft embellish their peripherals and bundle them with their next-gen consoles, I see developers being able to integrate special gameplay features for these accessories. For example, lets talk about Playstation Orbis. Day one I expect there to be one package and it will be bundled with all the peripherals that exist at that point in time.

We’re already seeing this alot as we come up on the end of this console generation with the both the Xbox and the PS3. Right now it’s almost impossible to buy a 360 without a Kinect. The bundle is priced so competitively with the console only option that buying only a console would be unintelligent.