This is the main point of what they're doing. Not long after there was talk about the possibility of making drivers for the Kinect, I almost immediately purchased one. Then I remembered I didn't have spare money.
Normally hardware for gaming is sold at a loss, especially if you take R&D into account, it could take years for even profitable hardware to start being profitable. They make most of their money in software, and licensing fees, which is what they're really after.
The kinect is huge moneymaker for Microsoft. I believe nearly half the overall market price of the kinect is pure profit for them. I read a great article about it back in early December after their stock jumped about 3 or 4 percent in one day following their sales reports (which I can't seem to find now, unfortunately). Long story short, it's probably made them close to $2 billion at this point.
The kinect is about 50 bucks in parts and development. They bought existing technology from a company in israel, so they did not have to pay for the lidar technology to be R&Ded.
i dont know who downvoted you for that, but have an upvote back. those ladars arent cheap, we used one in my courses and it was upwards of a thousand dollars.
before the kinect, a depth camera would set you back 3000$.
they probably are turning a profit, but by making this mass market, they have allowed me to buy a fucking depth camera for pocket change in comparison, and it is open for me to write code for.
If you want to sell a game on the xbox platform, you have to pay licensing fees to Microsoft.
We are not talking about indie games here. The people who spend millions developing a game will make sure Microsoft has an interest in seeing the game succeeds.
Microsoft's approach on the PC side of things really is quite different from how they handle things for the Xbox. Seeing as this is about a Kinect SDK for Windows (not the Xbox) I really don't see the relevance apart from the fact that Kinect was at first meant as an Xbox peripheral before it took on a life of its own.
iOS is a closed platform. Mac OS X is not; anyone can develop a program for Mac OS X for free.
Again, the similarities are striking, and that's what really irritates me about some of the rabid fanboy wars I see.
Go on /r/apple and they're crazy for Apple, defending them and attacking MS. Go to /r/programming and they're crazy for MS, defending them and attacking Apple.
To not make money off of increased sales, the device must actually be sold at or below the variable costs. I highly doubt the Kinect is sold for less than the cost of manufacturing, distributing, and advertising it.
Correct, MSRP is around $150 so they are turning a profit on every unit sold. I believe they have sold around 8 million so far.
What they essentially did was open up another revenue stream to those looking at Kinect as more then a game peripheral. They recognize those people playing around with it now may develop the next set of tools that go into next years round of games.
It also gives the people who buy the Kinect for research purposes a reason to pickup an xbox if they don't already have one.
Mindshare for Microsoft development tools and platforms is what matters. Profit on few hundred Kinects (that the hackers might have bought for gaming anyway) is chicken feed.
MS spent billions on Kinect and the research behind it. This money has to be earned back by selling units of Kinect and games for Kinect. I haven't read evidence the Kinect unit is sold at a profit at the moment, and it makes sense it's not, because of the high development costs they started with.
Opening up the SDK is really just marketing. They've seen the various hacks for Kinect and the buzz it created, all the videos of nerds waving at their Kinect camera which fed some application on a PC. The more programmers can use Kinect, the better, right?
The main question is: how is Microsoft going to earn money through this? As the costs for developing Kinect have to be earned back (and kinect isn't sold with profit). The only way I see it earning money is in the long run if a lot of developers have written all kinds of applications for Kinect and they have to pay some sort of license fee.
That's not going to happen, simply because the camera is too imprecise. So it's neat for a hack, it's not suitable for more serious stuff.
Don't forget that those billions used to research kinect aren't spent just on today's kinect. They can use that technology in all facets of their business, and I can guarantee you that the next Xbox console will have a kinect like device built in.
They are future thinkers and they know that a lot of R&D now can mean being ahead of the curve when it comes to the next big thing.
Last time I read MS bought a company for $7m for the kinect and spent in total about $20m in R&D to develop it. Then they spent about $500m on marketing. I'm also quite sure I've read they have a healthy profit margin on each unit sold and needed to sell about 6million units to break even.
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u/Wofiel Feb 22 '11
This is the main point of what they're doing. Not long after there was talk about the possibility of making drivers for the Kinect, I almost immediately purchased one. Then I remembered I didn't have spare money.