Xbox One ditches Kinect; gains enemy

He leapt in early, eager to possess the Kinect-powered Xbox One. Guess what our man thinks of the move to dump it and cut the price?

Finally… by Tom Tamblyn

The Xbox One should never have come with Kinect, but I’m not happy it’s now ditched it. Actually, I’m livid. The original Kinect was innovative, but expensive and flawed. It required us to talk to an inanimate object – a non-starter, really. That’s why Kinect was an opt-in product. So why was it ever made a requirement for buying Xbox One?

Full disclosure: I bought the Xbox One for full retail price, at launch. Shortly after, the Titanfall + Xbox One bundle fined me for not waiting. Around the same time, all my unutterably smug, PC-owning friends started telling me my console was underpowered – unable to offer the magic 60fps.

Kinect could also be said to be partly responsible for this; the Xbox One couldn’t devote all its power to gaming because it had given away a lump of its processing power to keep its Jetsons-style interface running.

This leaves the console with a double problem. At present the extra processor space given to Kinect hasn’t been reclaimed for gaming, but the accessory becoming non-essential means you can say goodbye to any thought of AAA games in the future that might feature it. Kinect was an afterthought for the 360, an annoyance when the One launched and will vanish now it’s not required. Developers won’t want to waste precious time and resources on Kinect when there’s no guarantee anyone will use it. Microsoft will also have to rethink the UI – it was built for motion and voice and it shows.

The thing is, everybody told Microsoft it was making a mistake with the positioning of the Xbox One. Sure as Duncan Bell says (left), people talk a lot of crap online… But in this case the gaming community was dead right, and the next-gen makers ignored us.