We’ve declared the death of the Kinect, the camera accessory for the Xbox One that could never quite recreate the success of its Xbox 360 forebear, multiple times now, but this is just another nail in its increasingly nailed coffin. Today, Microsoft has confirmed that production on the Kinect adapter for Xbox One S and One X has been discontinued.
This is especially significant because the One S and One X are the only Xbox One models that are officially sold- this means that Microsoft is no longer supporting a way for new Xbox owners to be able to use the camera accessory at all. “After careful consideration, we decided to stop manufacturing the Xbox Kinect Adapter to focus attention on launching new, higher fan-requested gaming accessories across Xbox One and Windows 10,” a Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement to Polygon.
Kinect support for Xbox has been increasingly gutted over time- no new games supporting Kinect have been released, existing Kinect games have been released with traditional controls, Kinect is no longer necessary or supported for navigating the Xbox dash, support for USB webcams an microphones has supplanted the Kinect, and of course, it is now impossible to buy the device or to use it with your console- this is it, this is the end of Kinect.
I wonder how many people will actually miss the much maligned camera, though.