Xbox Unbundles Kinect

Xbox has announced that it will continue to sell Xbox One’s – it’s next generation gaming and living room console – but it’s going to do it at a reduced price, without the Kinect. The $499 bundle with the Kinect still does exist, but for the future users will be able to save $100 by leaving the Kinect behind. It’s potentially part of a system thought out by Microsoft to catch up with sales of the PS4, which has been outselling the Xbox console in part because of the price. The Kinect also hasn’t quite justified its additional $100, as there are few games that support it, and fewer users still who use it to genuinely navigate through Xbox’s UI; it’s faster and ultimately easier to pick up the controller. Though the Kinect might indeed represent the future of gesture control in gaming situations, the reality of the situation is that the technology isn’t quite perfect enough yet to be consumer facing. Microsoft is spurning that future for the present, it seems, and in the process will hope to simply get the device into as many living rooms as possible – without that, Microsoft will have no platform on which to launch further developments.