I do not
It only took a year to go from the Xbox One won’t function without Kinect to Microsoft selling Kinect-free Xbox Ones. And while it’s been easy to live a clean, Kinect-free life these past one and a half years (the same one and a half years wherein the Xbox One has sold way more than it did initially), the Kinect is not forgotten.
“Overall, we don’t break down how many console users have Kinect and how many don’t,” Xbox chief marketing officer Mike Nichols told Polygon. “That’s a level of granularity we don’t want to get into. I can say that the people with Kinect still make up a very, very sizable portion and that those people do use it quiet frequently. Less for games, but a lot more for biometric sign-in and user interface.”
Nichols says a, “vast majority” of Kinect owners use it regularly, not just The Kinect Four, a nickname I just made up for the four people in the world who use the fucking thing.
I have to question the notion that, “people with Kinect still make up a very, very sizable portion” of Xbox One owners given how much better the console sold unshackled from the peripheral, but the idea that a strong majority of Kinect owners use it regularly? I mean, sound off, guys. Who’s using it regularly? I had about two weeks of novelty in turning the Xbox One off via voice commands while others were using it, and the thing has been firmly unplugged ever since.
The lack of guaranteed Kinect ownership has impacted Xbox One UI. “[S]o few people” used gesture controls, so the option was removed. Meanwhile Cortana, Microsoft’s version of Siri, will come to Xbox One this year in preview form and work with either Kinect or a mic and headset.
Microsoft: A ‘vast majority’ of Xbox One Kinect owners still use peripheral [Polygon]
