The Death of Gestural Play?

A few years back, David O'Grady, Jen Porst, and I completed a visual essay on the video game phenomenon of gestural play:  games that involve an interface that requires players to mimic "real life" bodily gestures (swinging a tennis racket, playing a guitar, etc.) in order to master the game.  The essay can be found at Mediascape.  
My segment dealt with the topic of genre and whether or not gestural play had become a genre or not.  Drawing from Rick Altman's work on film genre and looking at the topic from semantic (the elements that reoccur throughout a genre), syntactic (how those elements are structured), and pragmatic (how the genre is used and defined by players, critics, and the industry), I ultimately felt it was too soon to declare that gestural play was a proper genre.  It was, to borrow from Altman, an adjective to describe a gaming interface, bridging the gap between software, hardware, and the player.  


I admit that I had not thought about that piece or the concept of gestural gaming in quite a while.  I'm a sedentary gamer.  Aside from the occasional Rock Band (2007) tour with my faux band Anus Flytrap, I do not regularly engage with those types of interfaces (I am also not keen on sports games, nor do I have the apartment space to throw a digital gym down in my living room).  I enjoy games that involve sitting and I'm more interested in the intersection between narrative and ludic elements (those curious can find a piece I wrote for Pajiba on narrative and narration in L.A. Noire and Heavy Rain) than I am in interfaces and physical activity.  Yet, last week, a story at IGN.com caught my attention.  Essentially, the Playstation Move, released last summer, has sold 8.8 million units in roughly a year.  To put that in perspective, roughly 38.1 million Playstation 3 units have been sold.  Only 23% of Playstation users have taken the leap to the Move, a $100 upgrade.  To put that in an apples to oranges comparison that does give a bit of context, new game titles commonly run around $60 a piece and Call of Duty:  Black Ops (2010), the alleged best selling game for the PS3 has sold more than any other title - including Gran Turismo 5 (6.37 million, also released in 2010) - probably comes close to those Move numbers.  


Yet, what this rather superficial comparison fails to account for is that the Move is a piece of hardware and requires software developers to keep the content pipeline full whereas Black Ops is a piece of software with graphical engines that can be reused and/or licensed off.  Essentially, to develop software for the Move is probably a lengthy and expensive process, which may be why the slate of Move supported titles being produced dropped from 60 titles last year to a mere 16 titles for 2011.  Given that the Guitar Hero (2006-2010) franchise was recently given the ax and that musical games utilizing gestural interfaces, such as DJ Hero (2009), have failed to meet sales expectations, it may be time to put the adjective to rest.  


So much for becoming a genre of play...