Former Microsoft employees and third-party developers reflect on the rise and fall of Microsoft Kinect, which was once billed as the future of Xbox
For a moment a decade ago, the game industry looked like a very different place — Illustrations by Cobysoft Joe for Polygon Tweets: @papakipos , @simulacracid , @samitsarkar , @johntdrake , @phacktweets , and @genepark Tweets: Matt Papakipos / @papakipos : Kinect was such cool tech. It's not surprising to me that it wasn't a smash success in gaming. TLDR: Microsoft quickly sold $1b of Kinect hardware but game developers never fully embraced it because it was never a mandatory part of the Xbox platform. Fascinating lesson https://twitter.com/... @simulacracid : The original kinect is what first changed my thinking about computers and set me on this path. It's great to see some good retrospective coverage of it in Polygon. https://www.polygon.com/... Samit Sarkar / @samitsarkar : “We did find one time that bouncing a yoga ball, it made the Kinect think it was a person in a fetal position bouncing up and down,” [@phacktweets] says. “Which was, like, terrifying when you show the debug render. It was really gross.” https://www.polygon.com/... @johntdrake : Crazy to relive so many of these memories through this @Polygon story. The Kinect was really a unique and wild ride for a bit there! https://www.polygon.com/... Patrick Hackett / @phacktweets : Great article on the Kinect by @metallicaisrad, in which I dismiss a technology and then @dskillsaw turns and shapes my career with it. https://www.polygon.com/... Gene Park / @genepark : cool historical writeup on the Kinect, the personal assistance camera device that really set the Xbox back this generation, but was also a bit too ahead of its time. not lying that i've been wanting one lately, but it's still just a hassle to set up https://www.polygon.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Polygon's retrospective closes a loop that started with the former Rare developers' postmortem on why Kinect stalled — technical limits, no killer content, and Microsoft's tactical reversals once the PS4 changed the competitive math. The through-line since then has been retreat and repurposing: Microsoft ended manufacturing in 2017 after roughly 35M units sold (while continuing support for existing Xbox customers), then rebranded the sensor as an Azure AI development platform in 2018.
What the new piece adds is the platform-economics verdict from the people who built for it: Microsoft moved $1 billion of hardware quickly, but because Kinect was never a mandatory part of every Xbox, developers had no guaranteed install base to target — and without their software, the peripheral had nothing to do.
First-order effects
- For Microsoft, the retrospective hardens Kinect's status as a strategic liability of that console generation — the coverage itself reports it set the Xbox back — and validates the decision to stop manufacturing rather than keep subsidizing a peripheral developers ignored.
- For the developers quoted, including Patrick Hackett, who says he dismissed Kinect at the time, the piece is a vindication of the skepticism that kept most studios from investing in Kinect-only design.
Second-order effects
- The sensor didn't die with the gaming bet: Microsoft's Project Kinect for Azure redirected the same depth-camera hardware toward enterprise spatial-mapping applications, converting a failed console accessory into a cloud-attached developer product.
- Rival console makers reading the same history get a clear pricing-and-bundling lesson — optional add-ons don't attract software investment, which pushes any future motion or camera peripheral toward either mandatory bundling or abandonment.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, consumer hardware moonshots at Microsoft live or die by whether they're platform-mandatory, and the survivors get absorbed into the cloud business — consistent with Nadella's stated willingness to make big technology bets over protecting legacy lines.
- Kinect's afterlife outside gaming — interactive art, adult content, even ghost hunting, per the later coverage — suggests depth-sensing hardware finds durable niches precisely where no platform owner controls the use case.
The trend: Gaming peripherals only earn developer investment when they are mandatory parts of the platform, and Microsoft's response to Kinect's failure was to migrate the underlying sensing technology from the living room into its cloud and enterprise stack.