Mike Nichols, a marketing executive at Microsoft, has said that there’s a “vast majority” of Xbox One owners out there who have a Kinect and are still using the peripheral, while Nichols didn’t provide an exact number of how many Kinect units have been sold so far, he did reveal that users are not doing so much gaming with the sensor as much as they’re using it for user interface and for biometric sign-in.
In an interview with Polygon Nichols said that people with Kinect still make up a “very, very sizable portion” and that they use it quite frequently. “Less for games, but a lot more for biometric sign-in and user interface,” he adds.
Microsoft decided to bundle the Kinect with Xbox One when the console was first released back in 2013. However this meant that it had to be priced higher than the PlayStation 4 and that’s one of the factors which allowed Sony’s console to take the lead early on.
The company knew that it had to match the PS4’s price if it wanted sales to pick up so it decided to unbundle Kinect from Xbox One, that automatically lowered the console’s price while allowing anyone who wanted a Kinect to separately purchase it for $150.
While Microsoft continues to add features to Xbox One that use Kinect, such as Cortana voice search which will arrive in a future update, the company hasn’t said anything regarding games for Kinect. Several company executives have stressed that Kinect isn’t dead, only that Microsoft is going to support it where it makes the most sense.