As of today, it has been confirmed that Microsoft has stopped producing the Kinect. First produced in 2010, the peripheral sold 35 million units in its lifetime, although few will remember it as a success for Microsoft.
A lot of this will come down to lack of software. While initial launch titles for the device were fun and promising, there were very few games that actually utilized the motion tracking technology that Microsoft painstakingly created. By the time the second model rolled out for the Xbox One, the device spent its golden years as a voice recognition system for the console, and occasionally snapped pictures of QR codes to faster connect gamers to their DLC.
While the Kinect seemed like a mostly useless and neutered peripheral in its final years on Xbox One, the device found itself in the midst of controversy when information was released to the public regarding the NSA using the device to spy on American citizens. Microsoft denied the claim, but with the Kinect's "always on always listening" capability, it's hard to imagine any spying agency wouldn't use that technology to take a peek into our average lives.
As for the last game to be developed for the peripheral, the wiki page claims a fan-made spin-off of Roblox titled "Roblox Hong Kong" was the final game to utilize the technology. I'd like to say the Kinect's 11th hour was a peaceful one but...
If we're going down the road of officially licensed software there has been one other title specifically made for the Kinect in 2017, and it goes by the name Air Guitar Warrior:
With support like that, it's truly a wonder the Kinect failed.
Or did it? While a failure in the eyes of consumers, the Kinect was partly responsible for many tech advances within Microsoft as well as other facets of the tech world. The biggest of those would be the iPhone X, which uses the same depth-sensing cameras to recognize the user accessing their device. In fact, the same team that made the Kinect was responsible for the tech folks will have in their iPhone X's starting next week.
So continues the cycle of tech. For those of you currently in possession of one, stash it away somewhere and forget about it for 30 years as it may be worth something down the road. It could also be completely worthless, but at least that would be true to its legacy.
