RIP Kinect (Gaming)

by Kermit , Raleigh, NC, Wednesday, October 25, 2017, 14:07 (2587 days ago) @ Korny

https://www.polygon.com/2017/10/25/16543192/kinect-discontinued-microsoft-announcement

Personally, I'm bummed. Always liked the Kinect and using voice commands.

[waves to NSA]

I wonder how things would have turned out if:

• Microsoft didn't force that trash on everyone, and sold the Xbone at a much lower price. They definitely would have had a chance at having the higher sales figures this generation, since they had the more successful exclusives at the time...
  
  Or
  
  
• They stuck to their guns like they said they would, and continued to bundle the Kinect with the Xbone. Their sales would be even worse than they ended up being, but the Kinect would still be supported by devs, likely leading to some truly unique and fun experiences and implementations.

The path they took was definitely the worst of both worlds, and here we are, with the "essential" accessory that made the Xbone stand apart from the PS4 dead before the mid-gen console is even released.
It's weird to think that the Kinect had a strong (and arguably negative) impact on the state of Microsoft's gaming division, especially when you consider how hard they plugged it:

"Xbox One is Kinect. They are not separate systems. An Xbox One has chips, it has memory, it has Blu-ray, it has Kinect, it has a controller. These are all part of the platform ecosystem," -Phil Harrison ,MS Corporate VP

Personally, the Kinect (and the way MS latched features to it) was always dumb, and it surprises me that it took this long to die. Voice commands just seem really stupid to me when they replace one or two simple button presses... Maybe I'm just old.

I'm older, and I still use voice commands to launch most things on the Xbox. Haven't gotten the hang of it on the Playstation, else I'd do the same there.