My Take Radio

The suc­cess of the Microsoft Kinect and the Sony Move rests squarely on soft­ware. You can argue until you’re blue in the face about which one is bet­ter based on hard­ware specs but it is all going to come down to soft­ware. The best exam­ple of this is Gui­tar Hero (or Rock Band). I know Rich touched on this in his last show but I wanted to break it down a bit more.

With Gui­tar Hero, the pub­lic had to buy addi­tional hard­ware to play var­i­ous ver­sions of the game. The game itself was very well done, addic­tive and became a huge hit. Peo­ple were will­ing to pay for the addi­tional hard­ware because the game was so great, and they enjoyed the nov­elty of using phys­i­cal instru­ments as the game controller.

When you boil it all down, the Kinect and Move are exactly the same as Gui­tar Hero, but with­out the allur­ing tie in of the music game. Right now peo­ple are say­ing the Kinect is rev­o­lu­tion­ary and the Move is the Wii on steroids but if nei­ther has the soft­ware to cap­ti­vate gamers in the same way as Gui­tar Hero did, or the Wii, then both will only gar­ner mar­ginal success.

Which device will get the killer title first? What do you think?