A girl demonstrates the game "Kinectimals" for Kinect for Xbox 360 during a media briefing at the Wiltern theatre in Los Angeles
Xbox stands to gain little in the wake of the Sony PlayStation Network outage according to industry experts. REUTERS

Riding high on the instant success of its newly launched Kinect gadgets, which has already hit the 1 million mark in sales; Microsoft hopes that its hands-free sensors' growing popularity will help revive sales of its Xbox game console in the upcoming shopping season.

Kinect is also expected to counter competition from other gaming systems like the Nintendo Wii and Sony Move, according to a tech website.

The company is anticipating that their sales will remain high until the day right after Thanksgiving.

This is a good start for the company and the clients are enthusiastic about it, said Don Mattrick, President, Interactive Entertainment Business, Microsoft, in an interview.

In the U.S., over 30, 000 outlets are selling the new Microsoft product, including the outlets of Wal-Mart Store, Best Buy, GameStop Corp, Target along with Amazon.com on the Internet.

The new Kinect device is a sensing unit, which when plugged into the Xbox allows the users to play games with body movements as well as spoken commands.

The introductory price of the gadget is around $150 for the standalone device and around $300 when packaged with a 4-gigabyte Xbox console. The world's largest software manufacturer is expecting that this technology will help expand the Xbox 360 role selling almost 45 million gadgets.

Microsoft Wal-Mart Artificial intelligence Microsoft