Microsoft's Kinect camera isn't receiving much love anymore. One of the few services that used the camera's motion tracking features, Xbox Fitness, will be shut down progressively over the next year, according to the latest announcement from Microsoft Studios.
Xbox Fitness launched alongside the Xbox One, and used its second-generation Kinect camera to track heart rate and calories burned while performing exercises. While the service did receive reasonably regular updates, providing users with new workouts and features, Microsoft feels it is no longer sustainable to continue updating Fitness, so the service will be shut down.
Starting today, Microsoft has removed Xbox Fitness from the Xbox Store, preventing new users from purchasing the application. Anyone who purchased Fitness previously can continue to use the app until June 30th, 2017, after which all Fitness content will no longer be available.
This does mean that workouts users paid for will disappear entirely in a year's time, which will no doubt annoy the people that paid good money for them. However, the shut down does appear to indicate that the user base for Xbox Fitness was never particularly large, which made providing new content updates unsustainable in the long term.
With Xbox Fitness getting shut down, there is a serious lack of Xbox One apps and games that actually use the motion tracking capabilities of the Kinect camera. For those that purchased the Kinect, its primary use nowadays is a glorified microphone, and with the lack of even a dedicated Kinect port on the new Xbox One S, the accessory's useful days are numbered.
https://www.techspot.com/news/65364-kinect-takes-another-hit-microsoft-shuts-down-xbox.html
