Kinectimals is a Nintendog Ripoff done right and Invizimals is a Pokemon ripoff.

In Nintendogs I had a black and yellow dog and called it Pikachu.

Where is your god now?

In Kinectimals you get a Baby Deadly Predator that will one day claw your face off and could easily tear apart a canine with its massive claws and serrated teeth.

Where's YOUR god now? Oh wait, he's cowering before TIGERS AND PANTHERS AND LEAPORDS.

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driving away their "hardcore" audience by emphasizing the casual approach.

But let's look at this from another point of view.

Halo and CoD are possibly the two biggest gaming franchises around today and quite a lot of the fanbase of the latter (and obviously all of the former) use 360. A lot of the Halo and CoD fanbase are also casuals. So get some gimmicky shooter games using Natal and release a Gears of War/Halo for it and all of a sudden, it's a goldmine.

Plus the 360 is still a leading console for the hardcore third party titles. The Wii's biggest problem was that it was ONLY for controller waggle games and the hardware sucked thus no-one developed for it. The 360, however, will still be getting a steady stream of multiplatform titles, the only difference is there might be a few less exclusives (but since they're usually handled by other studios who have been bought out, even that's unlikely).

So it's not Microsoft changing everything, they're just adding it on to what they already have.

Ching ching.

True enough, but the casual gamer doesn't simply mean they'll buy anything. The casual audience supporting games like Halo and CoD probably won't be interested in "Kinect Sports" and such; most of that audience already has a Wii to get their fix of that. I'm not terribly up to date on the Kinect library in all fairness, but unless they've announced something big for it since E3 the library for it is mostly shovelware and clones of Wii games that simply aren't going to sell when that audience already has all they could want from that.

Now if say they were releasing mainstream franchises like Halo for example with Kinect support I could see them getting somewhere; but as it stands the casual market than wants shit like "[Brand] Sports" and such already have a far cheaper alternative, and the gamers who predominently play FPS probably aren't going to go out and drop 150+ just to play some Kinectimals. Now if Kinect does get good support then it make work out, but honestly I highly doubt it from what I've seen so far; and even if it does then they've still got direct competition in the Move.

With all that being said though even if Kinect is a surprising success; is it really going to be enough to carry them for a few more years? I really can't see that happening; not when they've got to directly compete with the PS3 and the possibility of a new Nintendo system not too far off on the horizon.

I suppose to put it another way I simply think they've brought Kinect out far too late in the generation for it to make a significant impact; and if MS genuinely think it's an adequate substitute for the "Xbox 720" they're insane.

Of course they're not thinking of it as an adequate substitute, this is just their way of sounding bigger. Sony refers to Move as a cool new accessory, Msoft refer to Kinect as a whole new console revolution; which one will the common dipshit float towards?

You're right though, unless they get that kind of support the whole thing will sink. With their money and influence I just can't envision them not getting that support.

Point taken, but Sony also has a rather impressive marketing department backing them. If anything I think Microsoft's hyping won't do them all too much good in the long run.

As for support, we'll have to see I guess. I just don't see developers taking the risk with Kinect when the Move is a far safer alternative, or could simply develop games that don't rely on support of a very expensive peripheral.