Microsoft’s Kinect, once known as Project Natal, was definitely no small-budgeted project. According to The New York Times, the software company spent “hundreds of millions of dollars” on development for Project Natal with a team of about 1,000 people. Even with the initial high cost Don Mattrick, Microsoft’s interactive entertainment business president, says that that the company will indeed make a profit off every Kinect that is sold. Unlike the days of the first Xbox.
According to Mattrick, the first Kinect prototype cost around $30,000 but thankfully Microsoft was able to slash the price down just a bit to about $150 per consumer unit. How much of that $150 is profit? Who knows. Not long ago rumors circulated that Kinect would be priced at $119 which supposedly would be a profit loss for the company; it stands that their profit margin is perhaps small and somewhere within the $31 price difference.
Surely Microsoft will be making money but will it be justified? So far the Kinect games are what people like Gizmodo’s Joel Johnson are calling “Wii-like” and nothing like the previous experience that we’ve come to know from Xbox. Different types of games remain to be seen however Ted Brown, a game designer for Buzz Monkey, remains hopeful.
Kinect will hit store shelves a little less than a week and a half from now on November 4th in the US for $150 USD and come packaged with the lower-end new Xbox 360 model and a game for $300.
