Former Rare game developers explain why Kinect stalled: technical limitations, lack of killer content, Microsoft's tactical reversals in response to PS4, more
Rare and the rise and fall of Kinect — Cancelled games, Xbox 180s and Kinect Sports - the story of a revolution that didn't quite take off.
Context & Ripple Effects
This Eurogamer oral history lands mid-arc: Rare's cancelled Kinect games were still fresh in late 2015, two years before Microsoft would stop manufacturing the sensor after roughly 35M units sold. The developers' three-part diagnosis — technical limits, no killer content, and the tactical reversals Microsoft made chasing the PS4 — explains why a launch-day differentiator for Xbox One became shelfware.
The story also foreshadows what came next: the same depth-sensing hardware was repurposed into Project Kinect for Azure, and later retrospectives from former Microsoft employees reached similar conclusions about why the consumer platform never took off.
First-order effects
- Rare's internal studios absorbed the immediate damage, cancelling Kinect titles mid-development as first-party support dried up ahead of the 2017 end of production.
- Third-party developers who had budgeted around Kinect's install base lost their differentiated-input pitch, since the developer retrospective confirms the platform never achieved mass adoption beyond bundled units.
Second-order effects
- Sony's PS4 pressured Microsoft into public reversals — unbundle moves and messaging flips — that further eroded Kinect's perceived value, turning a hardware bet into a competitive liability rather than an advantage.
- With the gaming market closed off, the sensor's viable customers shifted to non-gaming niches — interactive art and other experimental uses — leaving Microsoft to find an enterprise home for the technology instead.
Third-order effects
- Microsoft's eventual pivot of the hardware into Azure AI tooling established the pattern for failed console peripherals: consumer-facing sensor bets recycled into cloud and enterprise platforms where developers, not living rooms, are the buyers.
- The 'Xbox 180' reversal dynamic Rare's devs describe recurs in later Xbox strategy criticism over confusing release plans, suggesting platform-level strategic whiplash has become a structural feature of the brand rather than a one-off.
The trend: Console accessory bets that fail on killer content are being retired from the living room and repriced as enterprise sensing platforms inside cloud ecosystems.