its interesting how things change and change so quickly, just 3 years ago Microsoft released the Kinect and it became one of the fastest selling products of all time. it led them to an amazing holiday and the year after it lef xbox to its biggest holiday ever. but now fast forward two years and here we are, with Kinect being a major complaint about the xbox one from many consumers who are considering buying the new console. 

so what happened? did people realize that kinect doesnt really add much to the gaming experience? or anything meaningful at all? or is it that people do not understand the kinect and what it brings? 

personally, i think it was a fad, and what killed that fad was the kinect its self. after people bought the kinect, used it a few times, they got over it. People realized that as a gaming product, it wasnt a great thing, at all. games released for it were shallow and had no real depth. so why should people go out and buy a new 500$ system because of a product (kinect 2.0) that promises to do the same thing the first kinect promised to do 3 years ago, but never fullfiled on its promise? 

was Microsoft wrong to put too much focus on the kinect with the Xbox One, and will it hurt them in the long run?

For the games, blame the developers. The Gunstringer was awesome.

I agree. And maybe others like to control their Xbox with their voice, but its not something I would do if I owned the console. Using it for Skype and some games could be quite useful though I suppose. Personally I hope they sell the X1 without the kinect in the future.

I think people just don't want to pay $100 more for a console cause it has kinect... If MS said, x1 is going to be $400 and you also have Kinect, people would be like sure, give us more shitz... But since its not, people really don't want to pay that high of a price for a glorified webcam...

Kinect itself is a really nice piece of tech that no one cares about... It has potential to do a lot of things but really, no one does anything with it apart from experiments and youtube videos... I think it was successful only cause it was cool when it came out and it was optional

I dont think it caught on well enough to be able to meet requirments to fulfill fad status.

was going to say this. 

Partially, yes. You can see that by the way Kinect sales went over a cliff. Kinect 1.0 did not live up to its hype, especially relative to what Microsoft was saying about its effect on gaming. With Kinect 2.0, people are much more wary. Concept videos aren't going to wow people anymore.

I can't help but wonder what would have happened had Kinect launched with the XO instead of the 360. It might have been a huge difference maker.

It could have been huge for x1 if it was the first we heard of it. But xbox slowed way down before the hype of kinect. Before the ps3 was winning every week for quite a while. So it did have some sort of casual effect which helped its weekly sales to  over come the ps3 in america. But now that people know what to expect from the deviec it might lose america for xbox. As most people want nothing to do with it.

it would have, but then the question is, what would have happened to the 360? its not like the 360 was on fire before the kinect launched. it did 10M in 2009 compared to PS3's 13M. and next year, largely due to kinect, it pretty much matched the PS3. and managed to outship it in 2011 because of that holiday quarter, where again, we saw the "kinect effect" take place. if MS didnt release the kinect for the 360, momentum would have been much much lower for the 360 now. and the 360 would probably be dying off by now. so, would have MS been forced to release earlier?