The Microsoft Kinect — The Record-Breaking Hit Microsoft Killed by Forcing It on Everyone

Summary

The Microsoft Kinect was a $150 motion-sensing camera that let players control an Xbox 360 with their bodies instead of a controller, and on October 25, 2017 Microsoft confirmed it had stopped manufacturing it for good. Launched on November 4, 2010 as an add-on for the aging Xbox 360, Kinect did something no mainstream game device had done before: it watched the room, tracked a player's skeleton, heard voice commands, and turned "you are the controller" from a slogan into a product. People bought it in numbers that embarrassed every prior peripheral. It was not killed because it failed. It was killed, in large part, because Microsoft tried to make everyone buy it whether they wanted it or not.

The early success was genuine and historic. Kinect sold roughly eight million units in its first 60 days, earning a Guinness World Record as the fastest-selling consumer electronics device, and went on to move around 35 million units over its lifetime — a figure Microsoft cited when it announced the end. For a brief window it looked like the future of how people would interact with computers: waving, leaning, speaking, no controller required.

Then Microsoft made the decision that defined Kinect's death. When the Xbox One launched in November 2013, every console came bundled with a new, more powerful Kinect, which helped push the price to $499 — a full $100 above Sony's PlayStation 4 at $399. Gamers, who mostly wanted a games box rather than a living-room camera that had to be plugged in to work, balked. The PS4 outsold the Xbox One decisively out of the gate, and in 2014 Microsoft reversed course, releasing a cheaper Kinect-free Xbox One at $399 and quietly cutting the sensor loose.

Unbundled, Kinect lost its reason to exist: developers stopped building for hardware that was no longer in every box, sales dried up, and in October 2017 production ended. The technology did not die, though. The depth-sensing and skeletal-tracking work Kinect pioneered fed forward into Microsoft's HoloLens headset and, later, the Azure Kinect developer camera. The gadget that taught a generation to flail at their televisions was gone; the engineering that made it possible quietly went to work elsewhere.

Timeline

The Sensor That Read the Room

When Kinect arrived in late 2010, it was the rarest thing in consumer technology: a genuinely new way to interact with a machine that actually worked at launch. A bar of cameras and infrared emitters sat beneath the television, mapped the room in three dimensions, and tracked the player's body well enough to translate a kick into a kick, a wave into a menu selection, and a spoken "Xbox, pause" into a paused movie. Nintendo's Wii had proven that motion control could sell consoles by the tens of millions; Microsoft's answer was to remove the controller entirely.

The market responded with an enthusiasm that startled even Microsoft. Roughly eight million units sold in the first 60 days — fast enough to claim a Guinness World Record as the fastest-selling consumer electronics device — and more than ten million by March 2011. Dance and fitness titles, party games, and the sheer novelty of waving at a screen pulled in players who had never owned a console. For a peripheral, an accessory that traditionally sold to a sliver of an installed base, these were extraordinary numbers. Microsoft had a hit on its hands, and a tempting idea about what to do with it.

That idea was that Kinect should not be an option a few enthusiasts bought, but a standard fixture every Xbox owner had. The thinking was reasonable on paper: if every console shipped with the sensor, developers could rely on it, build for it, and unlock a new category of experiences that fragmented adoption had so far prevented. The flaw was that it asked every buyer to pay for, and find shelf space for, a camera many of them did not want — and to keep it plugged in and pointed at the couch as a condition of the console working at all.

The Hundred-Dollar Mistake

Microsoft committed to the all-in bet with the Xbox One. Announced in May 2013 and launched that November, the new console came with a redesigned, more capable Kinect in every box, and the system was designed to require the sensor to be connected. The cost of including it helped set the launch price at $499. Sony, having watched Microsoft, priced the PlayStation 4 at $399 and let buyers add a camera only if they wanted one. The contrast could not have been starker: a hundred dollars cheaper, and free of a peripheral a wary public associated with always-on cameras in the living room.

Gamers chose the cheaper box decisively. The PS4 outsold the Xbox One handily through the launch period, and the narrative hardened into a verdict — Microsoft had misread its own audience, betting that a motion camera was a must-have when most buyers regarded it as an expensive obligation. The privacy unease did not help: a camera and microphone that had to stay connected, in an era of growing anxiety about surveillance, read to many as a liability rather than a feature.

Microsoft blinked. In June 2014 it released a Kinect-free Xbox One at $399, matching Sony and severing the sensor from the console it had been meant to define. The reversal was the right business move and the death sentence for Kinect in one. Once the camera was no longer in every box, developers had no reason to build for it; once developers stopped building for it, owners had no reason to use it; and once owners stopped using it, the hardware was a manufacturing line waiting to be switched off. A peripheral lives or dies on whether the games support it, and Microsoft had just removed the guarantee that they would.

The Five Factors

Aftermath

The roughly 35 million Kinect owners were not stranded in any acute way — the sensors they already had kept working with the games that already supported them — but the ecosystem around the device simply stopped. New titles ceased to ship, the dedicated motion-control category Microsoft had tried to will into existence quietly closed, and the Xbox returned to being a conventional controller-and-screen machine. The 2014 unbundling is now taught as a textbook strategic correction: Microsoft regained competitiveness on price by abandoning the very feature it had bet the console on a year earlier.

The deeper mark was on Microsoft's own roadmap. The team and the technology did not disperse so much as relocate, carrying skeletal tracking and depth sensing into HoloLens and later into Azure Kinect, where they found buyers in industry rather than in living rooms. Kinect's broader idea — that you could speak and gesture at a machine and have it understand — became unremarkable within a decade, normalized by voice assistants and phone face-unlock that owed a quiet debt to the bar of cameras under the television. The product is remembered as a cautionary tale about mandating what people will happily choose, and as one of the clearest cases of a company killing its own success.

Lessons

References

• Microsoft ceases production of the Kinect Engadget
• The rise and fall of Kinect: Why Microsoft gave up on its most promising product Yahoo / Fast Company
• Microsoft permanently discontinues Kinect GSMArena
• Kinect Wikipedia