Adverts for Microsoft’s Kinect have recently appeared online – to much derision. As you would expect, they are aimed at the family market with lots of smiling, happy faces, nice living rooms and the tagline “you are the controller”. The games being advertised are Kinect Sports, Joyride, and Kinectimals. Whilst not the best adverts in the world, they certainly aren’t the worst – although the third one just creeps me out.
Source: Press Start Games
Tuffcub
Interesting to note that all three adverts feature players in very large rooms.
smokeybeef
That was one of my first thoughts too.
Also the fact that there is pretty much no gameplay, and they only emphasise a couple of gestures (running, steering and…bending backwards?)
All in all, I see what they were trying to do – similar to Nintendo with their Wii adverts showing people doing the motions and enjoying themselves – but it flops badly in my eyes.
Then again I’m not an unaware consumer.
bunimomike
Dear me, those ads are terrible. I actually thought the last one was the best as kids will want that so badly. Grown-ups with a penchant for something too young will also be setting up their own Kinect booths as we speak. Wrong, wrong, wrong!
Carl
I like the way they actually avoid showing the games at all. Maybe they realise how shit they are
TSBonyman
Those driving controls look so authentic :)
chris_huh
So they are so embarrassed about their kinect games that don’t even show them in the adverts. Also that last one just reminds me of when the Simpson go to Japan and watch Japanese cartoons, seriously who’s gonna want to buy a game that does that to your kids.
MXZ
The first one msde me fell sick.
what great advertising.
Kennykazey
Aren’t these supposed to make people want to buy kinect?
I think MS has got it all wrong…
Charmed_Fanatic
They all look pretty bad, would not persuade me to buy it!
gazzagb
Not bad, but they don’t really show the games, just peoples actions.
cc_star
I think they’re after selling the experience of playing, rather than the games themselves. They do that rather well and I’m sure the mainstream won’t have a problem with the ads, and will get behind the whole controller free controller aspect.
As far as the core goes though, they need to do something different to everything they’ve done up to now and there’s still no sign of them doing that, the negative press is at stratospheric levels that even if/when they do something good it will be buried under a tide of negativity, similar to the PS3 launch that Sony almost messed up so badly.
Perhaps they’ll have to launch a KinectSlim, drop the price and have a Kevin Butler figure, to replicate the PS3’s perfect storm to be able to go on to greater things.