It’s a good, solid start fo Microsoft’s new Xbox 360 motion camera, but it’s only a start. Microsoft probably would have hoped for a bigger injection into the market, but if it keeps this pace it could succeed.
The sales figures come from industry tracker VGChartz, and its computation of the number of copies of Kinect Adventures have been sold. That’s the game that comes packed-in with Kinect and isn’t available as a standalone retail item.
If you’ve been listening to any sort of Xbox official at Microsoft, you know the company expects Kinect to be something like the Super Bowl, the second coming of Christ, and , all wrapped up into one amazing product which will sell through the roof. Microsoft has poured $500 million into a promotional campaign for Kinect, more than any Xbox product of the past. It also says it plans to sell more Kinects in its first two months than any game console has ever sold in the same period of time.
So, in that context, is 480,000 all that amazing? It’s nearly on par with the pace of PlayStation Move, which currently tilts the global sales scales at around 2.5 million. The Move was released in September.
VGChartz also shows about 30% of consumers are buying additional games for their Kinect. The most popular of those is Kinect Sports, which has pulled down 142,991 copies sold, followed by Dance Central at 132,554.
Certainly when you look at a game like Call of Duty: Black Ops, of which over 5 million copies were sold in 24 hours, Kinect is not an uber amazing sales juggernaut. It’s a neat peripheral, though, and Microsoft’s huge marketing budget has managed to attract some consumers’ attention. It’ll likely be a hit for the holidays, but it may not live up to Tickle Me Elmo proportions.
