Microsoft has announced that the company is dropping the price of its popular motion sensor device the Kinect to $109.99 in North America, Latin America, and Asia Pacific regions. Followed by an Oct. 4, price cut in Australia and New Zealand. There is no price drop plans for Japan.
When the Kinect launched in November, 2010 it sold a total of 8 million units in its first 60 days and holds the Guinness World Record of being the "fastest selling consumer electronics device. The Kinect sensor has shipped 18 million units as of January 2012.
Microsoft had an advertising budget of US$500 million for the launch of Kinect, which was a larger amount of many than the company invested in launching the Xbox console, according to a 2010 article that appear in the New York Post.
Rumors have been swirling that Microsoft will release a new Kinect device when they launch the next Xbox in 2014. Eurogamer has reported that the new device is so powerful it can read lips and detect gamer's emotions.
According to a Digital Foundry report the original Kinect was priced as cheaply as possible to capture audience for the next edition of the device. Basically it was released as a sample of what motion sensors can do.
The Kinect 2 is expected to feed the new Xbox information at a higher speed and thus create a higher resolution. This price cut will only fuel the industry wide speculation that the Kinect's successor will be released when Microsoft release the new Xbox.