#12 — The fall of Kinect

We already talked at length about the rise of Kinect, but the tale of the little camera that sold over 24 million units on Xbox 360 alone doesn’t end there. What goes up, as they say, must come down, and this thing ended up crashing pretty hard. Part of the problem turned out to be the limitations of the system that would ultimately hold Kinect games back, while exacerbating that was Microsoft’s decision for go all-in on the device, both at the end of the 360 era and with the launch of Xbox One. The original reveal trailer for Kinect — then known by its codename, Project Natal — at E3 2009 looked like an awesome slice of tomorrow’s gaming today, but once the camera was out in the wild and we all saw first-hand some of the inherent issues with controller-free gaming via an affordable console add-on, it started to become clear that Microsoft’s original vision for Natal was beyond…