On stage during “The New Geography Of Gaming” panel at Web 2.0 Summit, the topic of conversation between Kleiner Perkins partner Bing Gordon, Activision’s Robert Kotick and Microsoft’s Don Mattrick focused on how amazingly engaging today’s games are. A key talking point was plastics vs. not plastics i.e controllers (or guitars in the case of Activision’s Guitar Hero) vs. the gesture and spoken command control interface of the newly launched Microsoft Kinect.
After having sold 1 million Kinects in ten days, Mattrick was feeling pretty confident about his company’s decision to cut out the plastic. When asked by Gordon how much Microsoft spent on the product before launch Mattrick jokingly stated, “It felt like in excess of a billion.”
When asked by Gordon when people should place an order for Kinect in order to secure one for the holiday season, Mattrick said, seriously, “by the end of this week” insisting that he was not just trying to spike early sales and in fact the product is in that much demand.