Microsoft: Ignoring its own advice

So we’ve all had a little opportunity to take in the news of yesterday with a heavy heart, lament about how we’re all shortly to be squeezed through an inappropriate and inaccurate control mechanism, should any of us think about playing a hardcore game any time soon.

Arguments have been posited about how Kinect’s large development budget, almost rivalling console R&D, means Microsoft can hardly back out at this late stage, but it wasn’t just anecdotal evidence that could have convinced the company that exanding its control device beyond music and dog-petting was a poor idea.

Take the sales graph Major Nelson gloated over just yesterday morning. If any of us can remember beyond the conference leak, it recorded the discrepancy between various formats’ lifetime sales with glee.

Call us overly negative, but our reading of that graph isn’t necessarily ‘wow teh xbox sells loads’ but ‘perhaps that motion control bubble has burst’. After all, the Wii’s peak occurs before most other consoles to have been considered a runaway success, with demand dropping like a stone now most of the casual audience has, what, moved back to the heroin, or something. Which kind of indicates that marketing motion control features to anyone at all, never mind hardcore gamers naturally disinclined to then, might be a poor idea…