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Comment by ColdStream | Hacker News Reader

It was once the Wii with anemic hardware and waggle ended up outselling the 360 that MS changed. They went from pushing forwards to chasing trends.

I agree, they need to be focusing on smaller projects that take risks. Maximum 24 month dev times but with modern tooling could do some special things. Maybe if after 6-12 months they see something that is gold, they can give it more resources but that would be on a case by case basis.

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I felt like the Kinect was pushing forward, and not chasing the Wii. Never owned one, but the tech sounded cool

It was 100% chasing the Wii. It didn't chase all that hard, either.

I might be looking at the Kinect with rose-tinted glasses, but bringing depth and camera-based pose tracking to the masses in 2010 is pretty impressive.

Sure they were chasing the Wii, but they did try to innovate on the hardware and capability front, and back then VR was nascent, but investing in this area for gaming made sense then (it was very easy to imagine VR games being the 'next big thing').

Unlike Nintendo, Microsoft couldn't really figure out good and fun gameplay for Kinect. Basically only dancing games took advantage of it well IMO?

And some sports games, which is where it seems clear they just wanted their own Wii Sports.

Not so much the game itself so much as the excuse for the masses to buy a console for a game even grandpa can play.

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