First dead in our hearts, and now dead at the manufacturing plant, the Kinect is no longer in production. Microsoft’s experimental motion detecting camera, which first launched in November 2010, will die off once existing retail stock is sold, Microsoft told the website Fast Co. in an interview.
Xbox One Kinect
The Kinect, a full-body motion sensor that would allow users to control games and applications by moving their appendages, first launched as an add-on for the Xbox 360. It was successful in its first few years, selling one million units in its first 10 days and helping drive popular games such as Dance Central and Fruit Ninja. Anticipating voice command technology such as Siri, the Kinect could also process spoken commands such as, “Xbox, go to settings,” and offered basic camera functionality for video chatting.
In November 2013, as part of a bundle with the Xbox One, Microsoft launched a second, more-improved iteration of the Kinect. Although many Xbox One players enjoyed using voice commands and other functionality, the Kinect proved to be an albatross for Microsoft’s console, forcing the tech company to sell Xbox Ones at $US500 ($642), a hundred dollars more than its biggest competitor, the PlayStation 4. In 2014, Microsoft cut bait, removing the Kinect from Xbox Ones and slashing the console’s price to $US400 ($514). It had become clear by that time that the Kinect – or at least its use in gaming – was a phase.
In the following years, the number of Kinect games dwindled. While in the past Microsoft had asked publishers such as EA to include Kinect functionality in Xbox versions of their games – Mass Effect 3, for example, would let you bark commands to squad members out loud – that trend didn’t last long.
Now, it’s hard to remember the last Kinect game we played. The Xbox One functions as a traditional, old-school gaming console plus high-end media service. The Kinect technology, for its part, lives on in Microsoft’s Cortana voice assistant, along with the tantalising but inaccessible Hololens and other Microsoft products that live far away from the world of video games.
[Fast Co.]
Comments
20 responses to “Kinect Is Officially Dead”
Wasn’t the best thing about Kinect if you swore in FIFA you got a warning from the ref?
http://m.neogaf.com/showthread.php?t=723175
I for one miss cool kinect features. I immediately ditched the Skyrim enhanced edition when I couldn’t shout the dragon shouts.
And Andromeda lacked the ability to change weapons on the fly, And speak the thoughts of Ryder. A big part of what made ME3 great for me was actually vocalising the dialogue options. (And also shouting ‘Boomstick!’ in the middle of a firefight)
As for pure gaming, what will the just dance series be without it? And I was gutted when the backwards compatible version of Child Of Eden didn’t support the Xbox One Kinect. And Disney’s Fantasia is one of the coolest things ever.
To sum up, I lament this ending.
Xbox On, forever.
The thing is that all those examples of voice control don’t really need the Kinect hardware itself: you could do it just as easily with a headset plugged into the controller.
But then I’d have to have a headset plugged into my controller. Why would I want that?
Best Kinect game ever was definitely Fantasia, felt so damn magical. Except they included the Demi Lovato version of Frozen, those monsters.
POOCHIE’S DEAD! *YAY!*
Kinect was a P.O.S. and I couldn’t be happier to see it gone. When the Xbone launched I suddenly had a bunch of totally unecessary problems that is never had before (controllers switching users when people went for beer, random pausing and unpausing when people were havong unrelated conversations).
To top it off it barely even worked and never provided a single helpful function. So yeah. YAY!
If it was so bad why didn’t you disconnect it? Actually you should still disconnect it as just because the aren’t producing them anymore, if you have one it will still work.
I did disconnect it. At which point I was able to enjoy a console that really could have used an extra $100s worth of hardware, being further tied down by an OS that was doing a ton of unnecessary nonsense.
Also im not one of “those people” at all, but i wasn’t delighted by the idea of a camera watching my living room 24/7.
Happy to see it gone.
had mine since launch, in the insider program and get updates 3 times a week.
never once (with a full house of people) have we ever experienced anything remotely like you are describing
Voice commands worked extremely well and if you were that concerned about the camera, yuo know they had a cover that cost $1?
But like i said, easier to whinge and moan than be constructive
easier to whine and slag it off than troubleshoot.
Seems to be the norm these days.
I enjoyed mine, and bought the adapter for my S as well.
I find the Kinetc quite useful for voice directions in Forza. I’ll keep it around for now….
Oh yeah I forgot about Forza Horizon. 100% used for talking to Anna.
The Kinect was always a V8 engine placed in a Lego car.
It did some cool things but they never got the full potential out of it.
We were always being shown the capabilities of the Kinect outside the Xbox itself, doing great thing initially, but eventually creating an obvious point of comparison.
It was more like a tropical fish aquarium placed inside a sports car. Something kind of cool and interesting in its own right, but completely unsuited to where it was being used.
It was sooooo well suited to the XBOX One. When it launched, before the main apps removed support, it was brilliant. When I turned the XBOX on the game was running by the time I sat down and picked up the controller. It made my XBOX One run so smoothly.
If it had of launched with the OS in any sort of acceptable state I think it could have went really far.
But did that really need Kinect? How much of that could have been done with just a microphone and voice recognition?
Does that mean no more Dance Central?
I was kinda hoping the Xbox One X would have more grunt to make better Kinect titles possible.
I love the fact that most peoples most popular feature of kinect was just the ability to do voice commands – in fact voice commands was all it took for a game to be “kinect enhanced”
Like you needs this expensive 3d camera to do voice commands? A headset could do that. Hell even an inbuilt microphone could of done that.
It’s a shame it couldn’t get it’s act together and produce some “must have” games for the XB1. I clocked up 100s of hours in the Dance Central series when I used it as my primary mode of after work exercise. Between that, Fruit Ninja and Child of Eden I actually had a really good time with the 360 connect. Heck with some friends and beer, even dodgier games like Kinnect Sports and Yoostar was pretty darn fun.
I think that was it’s downfall, though. It was at it’s best when it provided cheap thrills. It was always some great to bang on when a few friends were around, but really struggled to find any use more more than that.