Kinect was released as an add-on accessory for the Xbox 360 in November 2010. There was a relatively brief but massive swell of interest in the product that gave the Xbox 360 a sort of second-life. In 2020 I think it's kind of hard to convey how much people were excited, interested, and drawn in by the possibility of Kinect, but if your memory of that time is hazy I'll re-emphasize that it really captured the popular imagination. Kinect was probably one of the best-selling accessories/add-ons ever (at least among those that cost $50+). After a couple years of ho-hum software, interest in Kinect kinda died off. Games that required Kinect pretty much disappeared from the marketplace. For game developers there's not much point in making Kinect titles that only a tiny fraction of the userbase can purchase.
The Xbox One released 3 years later, in Nobember 2013. At the time, the Kinect was a mandatory part of the package -- if you got an Xbox One, you were going to get the Kinect camera and IR sesnors. By this point though, the lack of interest in Kinect-driven software was apparent. The Xbox One's Kinect was largely seen as an albatross chained to the console. People felt it was an unwelcome presence that increased the selling price of the system without providing anything interesting or valuable. I think this was probably inevitable, given the lackluster post-launch support for the 360 Kinect. Within 6-8 months Microsoft was basically forced to offer an Xbox One SKU that dropped all the Kinect hardware and offered pricing-parity with the PS4, but the damage done was pretty immense.
But imagine for a second that the 2010 Kinect never happened. Instead, Microsoft spent another 3 years refining the tech for integration into Xbox One. So instead of launching into a market where consumers were completely burnt out on motion controls, Kinect was something completely new. It would have been as intriguing and exciting as it was the day Project Natal was revealed. Suddenly the difference between the $400 PS4 and the $500 XB1 doesn't look so bad. Developers would be able to make Xbox One games with the assurance that all users would have a Kinect, perhaps ensuring broader support from more talented developers. I think one of Kinect's problems was that it only appealed to developers looking to have a quick cash-in on the motion control craze, but if there was a new top-tier platform where motion controls were the standard then maybe Microsoft could have attracted some talented developers that wanted to do more than imitate Wii games.
All that said, it does seem like motion control was a non-starter in 2012/2013. Nintendo's WiiU was released in 2012, but only really supported motion controls for Wii games in backwards compatibility mode. Nintendo was the innovator in motion control, and even they saw the writing on the wall. The fad was over, and it was time to move on to something else (even if that something was as utterly unappealing as the WiiU Gamepad). So maybe Kinect would not have drawn audiences to a new Microsoft platform, even if it had been offering something as interesting as a controller-free motion experience.
So if you were a decision-maker at Microsoft, would you have saved/delayed the Kinect to launch a new system? Do you think it would have been a major competitive difference against the PS4? That's not to say that the Xbox One would have been a smashing success, but maybe it could have held its ground against Sony a good deal better than what actually happened in 2013/2014.
Part of what inspired me to ask this was the level of enthusiasm surrounding stuff like DualSense haptics and 3D audio on Playstation 5. It seems like at a console launch, people are much more likely to be excited by wildly new tech, and to latch on to those features as difference-makers. While I'm generally skeptical of Kinect's practical value and applications, I think it probably would have created a lot more hype around the Xbox One launch.
The Xbox One released 3 years later, in Nobember 2013. At the time, the Kinect was a mandatory part of the package -- if you got an Xbox One, you were going to get the Kinect camera and IR sesnors. By this point though, the lack of interest in Kinect-driven software was apparent. The Xbox One's Kinect was largely seen as an albatross chained to the console. People felt it was an unwelcome presence that increased the selling price of the system without providing anything interesting or valuable. I think this was probably inevitable, given the lackluster post-launch support for the 360 Kinect. Within 6-8 months Microsoft was basically forced to offer an Xbox One SKU that dropped all the Kinect hardware and offered pricing-parity with the PS4, but the damage done was pretty immense.
But imagine for a second that the 2010 Kinect never happened. Instead, Microsoft spent another 3 years refining the tech for integration into Xbox One. So instead of launching into a market where consumers were completely burnt out on motion controls, Kinect was something completely new. It would have been as intriguing and exciting as it was the day Project Natal was revealed. Suddenly the difference between the $400 PS4 and the $500 XB1 doesn't look so bad. Developers would be able to make Xbox One games with the assurance that all users would have a Kinect, perhaps ensuring broader support from more talented developers. I think one of Kinect's problems was that it only appealed to developers looking to have a quick cash-in on the motion control craze, but if there was a new top-tier platform where motion controls were the standard then maybe Microsoft could have attracted some talented developers that wanted to do more than imitate Wii games.
All that said, it does seem like motion control was a non-starter in 2012/2013. Nintendo's WiiU was released in 2012, but only really supported motion controls for Wii games in backwards compatibility mode. Nintendo was the innovator in motion control, and even they saw the writing on the wall. The fad was over, and it was time to move on to something else (even if that something was as utterly unappealing as the WiiU Gamepad). So maybe Kinect would not have drawn audiences to a new Microsoft platform, even if it had been offering something as interesting as a controller-free motion experience.
So if you were a decision-maker at Microsoft, would you have saved/delayed the Kinect to launch a new system? Do you think it would have been a major competitive difference against the PS4? That's not to say that the Xbox One would have been a smashing success, but maybe it could have held its ground against Sony a good deal better than what actually happened in 2013/2014.
Part of what inspired me to ask this was the level of enthusiasm surrounding stuff like DualSense haptics and 3D audio on Playstation 5. It seems like at a console launch, people are much more likely to be excited by wildly new tech, and to latch on to those features as difference-makers. While I'm generally skeptical of Kinect's practical value and applications, I think it probably would have created a lot more hype around the Xbox One launch.
