Why kinect is bad

The goal of Kinect was to broaden the Xbox console's appeal beyond who you would typically think of as "gamers. The Xbox had been selling well since its introduction, but now needed something to set itself apart, as the Sony PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Wii were providing stiff competition. The Kinect was intended to be a shot in the arm, extending the Xbox 's appeal and providing a new platform for games and content that could take it into the future.

Microsoft Corporate Vice President Shane Kim once claimed that the Kinect would mean that the Xbox could stay on the market through The Xbox interface itself was given a revamp to be more Kinect-friendly.

The press, especially the non-gaming mainstream media, ate it up and gave the Kinect glowing reviews.

And within 60 days, Microsoft sold 8 million Kinects, earning it the Guinness World Record of "fastest-selling consumer device. Developers started to line up to make games for the device, too, with 17 available at launch, including "Kinect Adventures," a Microsoft-made game that came packaged with the Kinect sensor.

Most of those games were panned by reviewers: "C ritics are complaining about a lack of solid launch titles for the new control system; only 'Dance Central' seems to have anything to recommend it," said a Metacritic roundup of launch titles at the time.

But people realized it was new technology, and they were willing to give it time. Even when people noticed that you needed a lot of space to make good use of the Kinect sensor, nobody seemed to mind moving their furniture. A slow but steady trickle of Kinect games came out over the following months, but a lot of them fell into the "family entertainment" or "fitness trainer" veins, far from the core gamer demographic that made up most of the Xbox owning audience.

Worse, a lot of the titles got poor reviews , alienating those many who bought an Xbox just to play Kinect games. Microsoft convinced a lot of larger publishers of marquee franchise games to integrate Kinect features into their gameplay, but they were largely gimmicky — I'll never forget the time my friend got a red card in "FIFA 15" soccer for the Xbox because the Kinect's microphone caught him swearing.

We asked a former Xbox insider familiar with the development of the Kinect why it was so hard to find any good games that did cool things with the sensor. The simple answer is that the best of the best developers simply weren't interested because they had invested so much in making their existing, lucrative, big-budget franchises work frighteningly well with a traditional controller.

In other words, even if top-tier developers thought it was cool, they weren't going to blow the time and budget to make it work with their existing games. Plus, you didn't need a Kinect to play those games, so many players likely didn't even know there was any integration in those games at all.

At the same time, circa the early s, those developers who were best suited to creating really new, innovative games for non-gaming crowds were starting to shift their efforts toward the iPhone and Android platforms, where there was cash and a rapidly growing audience to be found, the insider says. The Kinect also introduced voice commands and a gesture interface to the Xbox itself. You could pause a movie with your voice, or log in to your account on the console by standing in front of the camera.

But as cool as that all sounded, the Kinect was still a new technology, and there were some glitches with those cool new interface tricks. Worse, the longer people used Kinect, the more they found places and situations where it just fell short and didn't work as well as it should have. In my apartment, playing a Kinect game requires moving furniture around to give the sensor the field of view that it needs to work well.

It's a big problem for lots of gamers, since you need 6 to 10 feet between you and the sensor. Meanwhile, you can sit on a couch in a room of any size and play a more traditional video game. Despite these pros, Kinect adoption was fairly strong, at least partially because Microsoft was pushing it as part of those bundles with the wildly popular Xbox console.

When you look at what Microsoft cared about [with] Kinect, they really cared about the future of computing. So as a creator I could suddenly envision a new way of personalizing gameplay, the gameplay experience, making it possible to even change the paradigm of storytelling and of social interaction.

All in all, Microsoft spends around 25 minutes of its press briefing talking about Kinect. It shows off a game where players can use their hands to paint on a digital canvas, and a soccer experience where players wave their hands to deflect incoming soccer balls. The developer is deep in research and development, trying to figure out what its next big franchise will be.

Its conclusion is a full-body dancing game. Initially, Rigopulos says, the idea is that players will strap on 3D spatial trackers to their wrists and ankles — either devices created by Harmonix, which had plenty of experience developing peripherals, or an off-the-shelf alternative.

Neither option, he adds, is ideal. Patrick Hackett , on the other hand, is unimpressed with Kinect. For developers , making games for Kinect often means fundamentally changing design philosophies, and having to change ways of thinking around simple features such as menus.

On the one hand, at Harmonix, this requires a lot of iteration and experimentation, and, in the case of menus, completely starting from scratch and having to reinvent design and user interface primitives, Rigopulos says. On the other hand, it is artistically liberating for the company to get the chance to reinvent the wheel. Some employees get creative when testing games on Kinect. Kristie Fisher, a game user researcher for Microsoft, invites friends — who are willing to sign nondisclosure agreements — over to QA-test the game Dance Central.

Numerous people use cardboard cutouts in place of actual humans when running skeletal tests. And the Kinect was perfect in that it did all of the heavy lifting and it gave you this box to play in. So all you had to do is, you just had to be willing to go apeshit inside of that box — which was very much the style of Double Fine development. Double Fine especially has fun when developing for Kinect. To test games, employees bring their kids into work. They take the hardware out in public, bringing still-in-development Kinect games to bars and restaurants.

Sometimes, waiters and waitresses get so intrigued by what Double Fine is doing, they come over and play too. They find plenty of other ways to play with the peripheral, though. It was really gross. Which is, of course, not shippable. Focusing on family-friendly games comes down to pinpointing what features the company wants to put front and center when revealing Kinect to the world, says Irving.

And there [was] a set of games that lended themselves to stand-up, full-body tracking — and they were much more family-oriented. It appealed to a broader audience than the standard video game console. Kinect, Microsoft hopes, will do the same thing. But targeting a device and games toward children means testing them with children. Which is no easy feat. For Fisher, the game user researcher, working with children during the QA process feels like having to double as a preschool teacher or family counselor.

That was weird. Kids would just charge the TV. To get consumers on board, Microsoft needs to get the Kinect in front of people. And Velazquez needs to do some math. In Redmond , Velazquez is running numbers. To drum up excitement for Kinect, Microsoft stages a U. For a lot of people, it is enough to sell them on the idea of purchasing Kinect — and they are willing to pay a good amount for it.

But, as the company gets closer to launch, it notices that the more people demo the device, the more people want the device. So it was distinctly higher than that. Raising the price helps cover the costs of the more expensive components in the device, such as the depth sensor. So, that was the interesting part as well — how well of a financial success, I would say, it was.

Rare actually went on the record to say that lag in Kinect Sports was ms , which would make it one of the more responsive titles available for the platform.

Even that only puts Kinect gaming at the same kind of response level as cloud gaming service OnLive at its best, but with the additional 'lag' of the human body itself, because jumping, kicking or waving your arms about simply takes that much longer than pressing a button.

There are also built-in latency issues with games based around gesture commands in that the system takes a certain amount of time to figure out what you're actually doing before it can even begin to turn your input into a motion in-game. This is not to say that Kinect can't host entertaining games. Kinect Adventures might not have been the Wii Sports-level killer app Microsoft hoped it would be, but it introduced the hardware and its capabilities admirably - Kinect Sports and its sequel likewise.

In Dance Central, the technology combined with a specific style of gameplay that proved a match made in heaven: in a game defined by processing set movements, lag could be totally factored out of the equation. While precision headshots were off the table, these games proved that grand, sweeping gestures could actually translate into some satisfying gameplay. Microsoft's depth-cam had its strengths, it had its weaknesses, but as long as the games were built around them, it could succeed and thrive as a platform in its own right.

It may not have appealed to the core in the way that Kudo Tsunoda suggested it would, but Kinect initially seemed as if it could overcome the dance and fitness fads and evolve into a companion platform to the Xbox aimed at the less committed gamer. But Microsoft wanted more. E3 is perhaps where things started to go wrong, where the messaging started to get rather confusing and where we saw Kinect begin to encroach into 'hostile territory' - the core market.

But even at this point there was still plenty of evidence that Kinect was a thriving platform. We saw titles like Fable: The Journey, Kinect Sports: Season 2 and Disneyland Adventures - designed from the ground up for the hardware, very much in the mould of the more successful first-generation titles.

Kinect Fun Labs showed another potential path for the tech in smartphone-style, "snackable" concept-driven games - a rich vein of potential that never really evolved much further. Purpose-built titles could see developers design around the weaknesses of the platform, but in the move to integrate Kinect into core titles, it suddenly started to look wholly inadequate for the task in hand. Forza Motorsport 4 gained an almost completely pointless control implementation where the player had no say over acceleration or braking - instead Kinect only offered value for its head-tracking and Autovista modes.

Ghost Recon: Future Soldier saw Ubisoft attempt to graft Kinect onto the typical third-person controller set-up resulting in an exercise which demonstrated the lack of "extra fidelity" in spectacular style. The eagerly-awaited Star Wars Kinect - teased at the Kinect reveal a year earlier - looked risible. And then there was Mass Effect 3's voice control - another value-added extra that left most of Kinect's expensive technology unused.

Kinect and traditional Xbox titles were clearly and obviously a poor fit, but Microsoft told an unconvinced audience otherwise:. Those new technologies - the longer that developers are able to play around with it and develop on it, the better their understanding of how to use the tech in a way that best fits the experiences they want to build is going to be," Kudo Tsunoda told VentureBeat at the time. It's great to see stuff showing up in more hardcore genres.

And I think the way that people are using it in their experiences really shows the breadth of what Kinect can do. It enables, I think, creative people to use Kinect in a way that really enhances their experiences in a meaningful way for people who love their franchises. The Microsoft Dream comes face-to-face with reality.

We were promised a system that offered extra fidelity for core gamers - here's how Ubisoft translated first-person shooter controls over to Kinect. The reality proved to be somewhat different. Across the board, the arrival of Kinect in core titles manifested merely as novelty bonus features that could safely be ignored. In a business where development resources are at a premium, nobody outside of Microsoft really had the time to invest in getting the most out of the Kinect hardware - and they certainly weren't going to fundamentally redesign their games to suit camera functionality only a minority of the userbase could use.

In the meantime, Gears of War: Exile - hotly rumoured to be an on-rails Kinect-exclusive chapter in Epic Games' franchise - was canned. To this day we've yet to see any kind of convincing Kinect implementation that can accurately use the system for the kind of precision gunplay a traditional core shooter requires.

Put simply, you can point and shoot with the Wiimote and PlayStation Move, but you can't with Kinect, which is wholly reliant on big, obvious movement. There is no connector for the Kinect directly though. You have to have an adapter. In theory, it may still be a key element of what makes the system unique, but its removal says otherwise. Microsoft formally announced it would stop manufacture of the Kinect for Xbox One on October 25, Microsoft eventually discontinued the adapter in January , stating that they were shifting to manufacture other accessories for the Xbox One and personal computers that were more in demand.