Microsoft Kinect Will Outsell iPad At Launch, Says Kudo Tsunoda
When a company is launching a new product, especially a major one that they hope will be a smash hit, it's perfectly normal to see employees –especially the higher-ups– start talking up sales, figures, and expectations. Sure, you can see exceptions to the rules some times, like when Sony Computer Entertainment's Vice President said that Move wouldn't have huge day ones sales (which, for the record, is today), it's usually more like what Kudo Tsunoda said in a recent interview with Gamasutra.
The main takeaway? Tsunoda, the former EA Chicago head and current figure head for Kinect (formerly known as Project Natal), went ahead and said that "preorders have been really strong. As far as what we're looking at for Holiday, this is going to be stuff that'll blow away any of the sales you've seen with the iPad." We're confused as to why Tsunoda decided to bring a different piece of tech, from an entirely different market, into the whole conversation. Actually, it makes perfect sense: in the first 28 days, the iPad sold 1 million units. Obviously, he believes that Kinect will beat these numbers.
He didn't go into any specifics, like what kind of time frame we are looking at to see these monstrous sales happen, but the gist was that at launch, Microsoft's motion-sensing peripheral would out-sell the iPad. He has a point, in that the Xbox 360 is currently out-selling the Nintendo Wii and Sony PlayStation 3, and there are literally millions of people out there who own an Xbox 360, but that doesn't necessarily translate into Xbox 360 owners buying Kinect.
The peripheral is set to launch here in the United States on November 4th, and in the United Kingdom on November 10th. That's just under two months from now, and we imagine that pre-orders are indeed still going on, and will be all the way up until the launch date. And, if Microsoft puts any effort into the marketing campaign for Kinect, and we're sure they will, then there's a chance that even more potential buyers ready their hard earned cash to get their hands on the new hardware.
[via Gamasutra]