Microsoft sells 10M Kinects, wins Guinness Record in the process

Microsoft’s Kinect motion control system for the Xbox 360 has surpassed 10 million units sold, with more than 10 million Kinect standalone games sold as well, the company announced today.

The system is also now a Guinness World Record holder: The Kinect is the “Fastest-Selling Consumer Electronics Device” because it managed to sell 8 million units in its first 60 days available — from its launch on November 3, 2010, to January 3, 2011. That means the Kinect has outsold both the iPhone and iPad in their first 60 days on the market.

In comparison, Sony said that it shipped 4.1 million Playstation Move motion controllers after being available for two months. That number doesn’t specify how many Move devices were actually sold to consumers though, and Sony hasn’t issued any updated sales numbers since late last November. Sony’s silence tells us that the Move is not doing nearly as well as the Kinect.

Given the above numbers, we can infer that the $150 Kinect has sold 2 million units in 2011 so far. That’s a definite slowdown from its ridiculously strong 2010 holiday season sales, but it’s still impressive for such a new device. The Kinect still has some issues, as VentureBeat’s Dean Takahashi noted in his review of the system, but clearly it seems that consumers are taken with the idea of a full-body motion control system.

Hackers have also found plenty to like about the Kinect. The device was hacked only a few days after it launched, and it didn’t take much longer for hackers to use that exploit to make cool science-fiction interfaces a reality. Wisely, Microsoft chose to embrace the hacker community by releasing a software development kit that will let amateurs tap into the Kinect’s capabilities.