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There's only one reason Kinect didn't happen. Microsoft dropped the requirement for it to ship with every Xbox. The moment they backtracked and made it option
by askafriend 7y ago
There's only one reason Kinect didn't happen.
Microsoft dropped the requirement for it to ship with every Xbox.
The moment they backtracked and made it optional, they killed any potential it might have had. Developers didn't see a point in supporting an optional accessory that few would spend the extra money to buy. As a result, no good games came out that supported it, and Microsoft themselves lost the incentive to further develop the software interface and APIs.
It's really that simple.
- mjevans 7y agoWhile I agree, what drove them to make that decision was not having a good set of launch titles to make the device and it's use a killer-app to drive the whole package.
- gambiting 7y agoNothing is ever that simple, and I'm saying this as a game developer working for a large studio. To me, the most obvious issue wasn't the bundling or not bundling of kinect with every xbox - it was the fact that having it active was actively taking up processing power of the xbox, which was already more limited than that of the rival PS4. If it had been "free" to use from computational standpoint, then more games would have integrated it I am sure. But if using kinect in your game meant producing an inferior product for that platform(from performance/visual point of view) then kinect support was the first thing to drop. Kinect was dead for that reason even before Microsoft decided to sell kinect-less Xbox One.
- mjevans 7y agoA cross-platform title already would be very unlikely to use Kinect. For those games this hardware would just be dead weight. However, (as I was thinking of in my other reply), a killer app based around Kinect might have driven support for getting Microsoft hardware rather than Sony hardware.