Death of the Kinect: A look back on one of Microsoft's biggest failures

Every large company in gaming has had a failure or two over the years; the one question to ask is how long will it take for a corporation to pull itself back from failure and realise the mistake they made? With the recent roll-out of the “New Xbox Experience” on Xbox One, there’s one main detail which has caught my attention; the removal of gesture controls from the Kinect. I’ve expressed my disdain towards the motion sensing peripheral briefly a couple of times on this blog. Now that the device is being killed off for good, I think it’s time I did a full-fledged analysis/retrospective of why the Kinect failed so horribly as both a gaming peripheral and a piece of consumer technology.

E3 2009: Project Natal Announcement

Since 2006, the motion gaming scene had the industry in a tight grip; the Nintendo Wii had millions upon millions of people playing games, even those who had been uninterested in them before. Wii Sports still stands as one of the best-selling games of all time and it served a pitch perfect base for Nintendo to engage with the casual market, putting them miles ahead of both the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3 from the offset. Of course, when any product achieves such a massive success, business competitors will inevitably have to respond in order to keep up. Sony would retaliate with PlayStation Move controller, which ended up being ridiculed for its peculiar aesthetics and design, but Microsoft would go in a different direction. At E3 in 2009, audiences were treated to Microsoft’s newest innovation, referred to as Project Natal. Natal looked genuinely unique and innovative if you judged it by the debut trailer alone; not only that but it also seemed like a fine alternative to the Nintendo’s motion controls, touting the phrase “You are the controller” with full body tracking and facial recognition. Kinect looked to do for motion games what its competitors couldn’t; actually get players up off the couch rather than have them simply flick their wrists. As with many Microsoft tech demos, the functions of the Kinect appeared to extend outside of games as well; scanning and using external items to play as well as gesture controls for movies were all seen in the demo. The stage was set for games and entertainment as a whole to become more immersive, more interactive and more engaging; little did we know how hollow this promise would ring…

E3 2010: The embarrassment begins…

Microsoft’s first showcase for the final product, named “Kinect” took place at Microsoft’s E3 press conference. One of the first lines spoken by Microsoft execs was this: “Last year we made a promise that Kinect would revolutionize the way you had fun, today we deliver on that promise”. What came next was quite a sight to behold; the promising features shown off in the Project Natal announcement were gone and in their place were dreadfully forced demonstrations alongside some of the most cringe-worthy stage demos the gaming community had ever seen at the big show. The poor young girl overacting in Kinectimals, the embarrassing Kinect Adventures demo and the awkward Dance Central showcase were just some of the moments that swamped the proper games Microsoft showed off throughout the conference. This was our first sign that something was wrong; when Kinect Creative Director Kudo Tsunoda took to the stage and showed off “the underside of an Xbox Avatar’s shoe” the avatar on screen appeared to jerk about strangely, not registering the executive’s movements very well. Was the device inaccurate? Nobody could tell for sure, considering how the product wasn’t yet out for general consumption. Looking back on the conference now, it was hard not to feel sorry for all the performers who embarrassed both themselves and the company they were representing. It firmly planted Microsoft at the bottom of the barrel of E3 that year; but rather than taking on feedback and taking steps to improve their conference, the corporation instead chose to continue their downward trajectory, one which was spearheaded by the Kinect and the numerous failings that were yet to come.

November 2010: Kinect for Xbox 360 launches to a surprising success

Microsoft’s dreadful E3 presser did not slow down the original Kinect in the months leading up to the release later that year. The casual market that Microsoft was targeting did not constantly tune in to gaming events; soon the Microsoft marketing machine kicked into gear with a five hundred million dollar marketing campaign and the device arrived in the hands of consumers just in time for Christmas. The campaign even included a live performance by American R&B singer Ne-Yo in Times Square, New York. It was a very successful launch for the peripheral, with eight million units flying off the shelves in the first 60 days. The Kinect set a record for the “fastest selling consumer electronics device” in the Guinness book of records. From that point on, Microsoft knew that the device was something they could push hard with, even with all the persistent negative feedback that was thrown their way.

E3 2011: Microsoft’s image in the eyes of fans continues to plummet

Microsoft would continue to turn their backs on the fans that had made their console so successful in 2011. The dreadful E3 presentations continued for the second year in a row with obnoxious football players, more overzealous child actors and mediocre projects which ended up having no proper payoff. But Microsoft simply would not listen; their marketing campaign had worked, the Kinect was selling well and they would continue to invest in the device for several years. Even Rare, the once renowned British developer of titles such as Goldeneye and Banjo Kazooie in the nineties found themselves pressed into making Kinect games year after year for their owner, something which long term fans cried foul of.

E3 2012: Awful exclusive titles come, thick and fast

As bad as games like Fighters Uncaged and Kinect Joy Ride were, they were only the first of a multitude of poor titles to grace Microsoft’s Kinect. The quality of Kinect games grew progressively worse; for every Dance Central, there were three or four badly thought out games. It came to a head in 2012 when the motion games for Kinect really started to infuriate people. Star Wars: Kinect was touted as one of the biggest titles for the Kinect and it ended up being a basic and underwhelming collection of mini-games that served to highlight how the Kinect was taking games backwards rather than forwards. Many fans felt that Steel Battalion: Heavy Armour ruined their beloved franchise, taking what was once a unique gaming experience in gaming and turning it into an exercise of intense frustration; players were left furious when the Kinect refused to read their motions, suffering the same cheap reloads time and time again. Fable: The Journey was condemned as a terribly basic and ill-conceived on-rails affair that took away from the already under-delivering fantasy franchise. Finally Dragon Ball Z and Harry Potter for Kinect were two of the laziest and most bare-bones motion games ever seen; embarrassments to the franchises they were based on. 

Why were these titles all so bad? I’d say it all comes down to the inaccurate tech used by the Kinect; it was difficult to program for and the sensors themselves simply could not register precise and complex movements. Because the Kinect’s functionality was so basic, developers could do little other than simplistic designs and gameplay and the progression, not to mention the evolution of titles for the sensor grinded to a halt. The only other times where Kinect was used for games was voice commands in titles such as The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Mass Effect 3, but these felt more tacked on than anything else.

May 2013: Xbox One Announcement

It’s been over two years, but the memory of the disastrous debut of the Xbox One still remains etched into the minds of scores of gamers. Between digital rights management and a badly conceived focus on television, Microsoft seemed to be doing everything possible to enrage their most loyal fans. The rotten cherry on top was the new Kinect, which Microsoft claimed was far more accurate and advanced than the original. A majority of Xbox fans and general gamers were not impressed in the slightest with the new Kinect and this was exacerbated by the then recent leaks of NSA surveillance by Edward Snowden; rumour after rumour began to circulate around the web that the Kinect would be used to spy on people, that it would become a kind of corporate HAL 9000 used by security agencies. Who could blame them? Microsoft’s original plans for the Xbox One demanded that the Kinect be plugged into the console at all times; a highly restrictive and questionable component of their strategy. It was incredibly frustrating to watch; after the failure of the original Kinect for Xbox 360, most had hoped Microsoft would have learned their lesson and give up on the peripheral, but it would be another year before that would happen. They continued to force the Kinect into every aspect of their marketing, adamant that the Xbox One would not function without it. Even when the corporation reversed their controversial policies soon after E3 of that year, the Kinect was still a sore spot for many.

November 2013: The bad exclusives continue, while the better ones fail to gain traction

The new Kinect proved to be a tremendous burden for Microsoft’s current platform; people didn’t want it and yet the corporation insisted on everyone having it anyway. The Xbox One did manage to come out of the gate fairly well, but the games for the device just didn’t get any better. Fighter Within was a broken mess of a motion controlled game and whilst other titles such as Dance Central Spotlight and Kinect Sports: Rivals were competent enough, they didn’t receive nearly as much attention or praise as their predecessors did. From that point on we had nothing to go on when it came to Kinect sales figures. The last time we were told how many Kinect sensors had been sold was 24 million for the Xbox 360, according to an article from Gamespot in February 2013. Try looking up Kinect sales figures for 2014 and 2015; there’s nothing there. It could be assumed that after the initial rush of early adopters, things slowed down massively for the device; there were no solid games to keep people around and people began to ask for an Xbox One without the Kinect. Why? Because it simply wasn’t useful enough to warrant the one hundred dollar price bump; people were beginning to catch on to the device’s numerous shortcomings and developers slowly began to withdraw from making games for it.

May 2014: Microsoft unbundles the Kinect

I think the ultimate reason why the new Kinect didn’t succeed is because consumers had gotten sick of it; they were tired of Microsoft’s insistence on shoving the device in everyone’s face. The extreme levels of controversy surrounding the Xbox One’s announcement, and the fact that early adopters had to get the new Kinect with the system whether they liked it or not didn’t help either. It took four long years for Microsoft to finally realise just how badly the device was holding them back; they saw how much the PlayStation 4 was selling because they didn’t force a camera into the package, nor did they constantly ramble on about how important it was to the system’s infrastructure. The decision was made to begin selling a cheaper Kinect-less Xbox One in May 2014 and when that happened, sales for the console doubled. The message could not have been any clearer; the Kinect was unwanted, undesirable and unnecessary. For many, this marked the beginning of the end for Microsoft’s failed peripheral.

April 2015: Kinect for Windows production ceases

Microsoft has always had a rather questionable strategy for dealing with external devices and accessories; rather than allowing other third party hard drives, headsets or adapters to work with their systems, they instead demand that everyone purchase officially branded Microsoft or Xbox add-ons instead. Soon after Kinect for Xbox One was launched, they made a separate model of the device which would only work on PC. It was not received very favourably and the PC model proved just as unpopular as the version on its console counterpart; this prompted the corporation to release an adapter which connects the Xbox One Kinect to a PC. Despite this more consumer friendly move, Microsoft announced that the Kinect for Windows V2 would no longer be produced earlier this year.

November 2015: The New Xbox Experience eliminates gesture controls

The only thing the Kinect has now is voice controls and that’s pretty basic considering the same sort of thing could be done with headsets or microphones. There’s practically no reason to use the Kinect anymore and Microsoft doesn’t appear to be showing any more interest in the device they once pumped so much money into. While there may be those who still enjoy the Kinect for its voice controls, they are in the growing minority, and now that the latest Xbox One update has removed gesture controls, the final nail has been hammered into the coffin for the disappointing device. It seems that from the get-go, a vast majority of the gaming community felt little other than apathy and distaste towards the peripheral, a device which was designed to leech off of the Nintendo Wii’s success with the casual market. Sony’s PlayStation Move was guilty of a similar thing as well, but Kinect became the most infamous for its butchering of popular franchises and licenses, not the mention the sheer arrogance of a company who for too long believed in selling an inaccurate and poor value product to unwilling consumers.

Thankfully, things have now changed; Microsoft has clawed its way back from the ire of consumers and fans with new leadership and most importantly, a new focus free from gimmicks. The motion gaming scene has also picked up and moved on for the most part, Rare has turned back to making platformers again and the laughable press conference demonstrations have been phased out completely. The Kinect is no more, but it still stands as one of the biggest missteps Microsoft have ever taken in their time in the gaming industry.

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