Waving and Shouting

Reviewers of the device suggest that it calls for six feet (about 185cm) of clear space in front of your television for a single player, and more like eight feet (245cm) if you want to get two players involved. This limitation reveals a great deal about the thinking behind Kinect's market. That kind of space isn't terribly uncommon in the living rooms of suburban American homes, after all. It's not unreasonable to think that a large proportion - perhaps even a majority - of middle-class American family homes will be comfortably able to accommodate Kinect gaming, without doing anything much more dramatic than moving a coffee table.

In cities, however, that kind of living space is extremely rare - doubly so outside the United States. Japan isn't really a huge market for the Xbox 360, so the often-noted smallness of Japanese apartments probably didn't weigh too heavily on the minds of Kinect's engineers. The UK, however, is practically the Xbox 360's "51st state", the key market outside the United States where the console holds significant sway - and a popularly reported and easily believable piece of research a few years ago revealed that the UK's new-build homes had just surpassed Japan to achieve the dubious honour of being, on average, the world's smallest living spaces.

Even if that research no longer holds true, the reality is still that UK homes, especially in the densely populated south-east, are small. Having lived in London for a decade, I can count the number of homes I've been into which have had six feet of clearance between TV and sofa without running out of fingers (and in Japan, I don't think I've ever seen one). Again, there are large suburban homes for middle-class families where Kinect will work out just fine, but the proportion of families living in that kind of large home is much smaller than in the USA.

I don't doubt that Microsoft has done its homework (no pun intended) and figured out what proportion of households in its target markets can accommodate Kinect's sizeable space requirements. However, the reality of that figure is less important than the public perception. The real risk to Kinect is that this could poison the word of mouth around the system, replacing positive buzz for the stronger launch titles with a torrent of stories about having to return the device due to not having a large enough house to use it. It's exactly the kind of slightly bizarre consumer account which gains huge traction and amplification on the internet, and risks damaging Kinect as badly, if not even more badly, than the negative buzz created by the "Red Ring of Death" failures a few years ago did the Xbox.

On top of all of those factors, there's the simple fact that Kinect has serious competition. The idea that the Wii is on its way out is a popular meme both among gamers and within the industry, but the reality is that Nintendo still dominates software sales charts in a lot of territories, that the Wii's installed base is still immense compared to its competitors - and that, as Satoru Iwata noted recently, the system is still selling better, week on week, than the all-conquering PS2 was at the same point in its lifespan. The idea that Kinect just needs to push over a wheezing rival on its last legs is attractive to the systems' proponents, but simply isn't true - and that's even before you consider the possible impact of PlayStation Move.

Naysayers doubted the technical capabilities of Kinect, back when it was still called Project Natal, and I confess that at times I was among them. On that front, the launch is something of a triumph - the system works, several of the games are solid, and Microsoft's ambition of truly controller-less control has come to fruition. However, that triumph is tempered by the reality of the rocky road ahead.

It's not hard to imagine a future in which Kinect-style control is a standard part of life in every living room. Equally, however, it's not hard to imagine that this is a technology ahead of its time - one we'll look back on in a decade or two as pioneering, but doomed to failure by market conditions and technical drawbacks. That's the outcome Microsoft will be doing its level best to avoid over the coming months. The firm's substantial clout is all being brought to bear behind Kinect - and its success or failure in this attempt will have a serious and long-term impact on the entire console gaming market.