Clearly what is deemed a "success" can mean very different things to a shareholder, or customer, or just reviewer.
I think the Xbox 360 Kinect is a good example of that divide. According to sheer sales figures it was one of the best selling add-on peripheral of all time. Microsoft saw it as a huge success it made tons of money so how could it not be a great success? The thing was, it was bought on a whim by people who were jumping on the motion gaming trend ushered in by the Wii. When people actually had it, they didn't like it. They didn't buy many games for it. 3rd party devs took notice of this and didn't make many games for it. Although reviewers were mostly positive about it at first, ultimately the games that were presented on the platform were panned. Anyone who looks at it holistically, should see that it was actually a massive failure, but of course, simple dollar statistics and graphs seem to lead the graphics in boardroom discussions. The stats misled executives into believing the casual audience that drove Wii and Kinect sales into huge numbers, were actually not a reliable and steady source of FUTURE income. They didn't see that their core audience, whom consistently and steadily return to buy more core non-gimmick games were the more reliable customer.
So the corporate suits at Microsoft still considered the Kinect 1 as a massive success. And then went on to make a massive mistake in bundling the Xbox One with Kinect 2 (was the only option at launch), forcing them to charge more for that bundle than the more powerful PS4. They eventually bundled the XBOne without Kinect and stripped the integrated features completely out of the operating system, essentially quietly admitting the Kinect was a failure.
I think the Xbox 360 Kinect is a good example of that divide. According to sheer sales figures it was one of the best selling add-on peripheral of all time. Microsoft saw it as a huge success it made tons of money so how could it not be a great success? The thing was, it was bought on a whim by people who were jumping on the motion gaming trend ushered in by the Wii. When people actually had it, they didn't like it. They didn't buy many games for it. 3rd party devs took notice of this and didn't make many games for it. Although reviewers were mostly positive about it at first, ultimately the games that were presented on the platform were panned. Anyone who looks at it holistically, should see that it was actually a massive failure, but of course, simple dollar statistics and graphs seem to lead the graphics in boardroom discussions. The stats misled executives into believing the casual audience that drove Wii and Kinect sales into huge numbers, were actually not a reliable and steady source of FUTURE income. They didn't see that their core audience, whom consistently and steadily return to buy more core non-gimmick games were the more reliable customer.
So the corporate suits at Microsoft still considered the Kinect 1 as a massive success. And then went on to make a massive mistake in bundling the Xbox One with Kinect 2 (was the only option at launch), forcing them to charge more for that bundle than the more powerful PS4. They eventually bundled the XBOne without Kinect and stripped the integrated features completely out of the operating system, essentially quietly admitting the Kinect was a failure.
