Watching Microsoft do its best to integrate the Kinect motion sensor camera for the Xbox One has been interesting to watch as the device started out as an absolute necessity for the latest generation of Xbox that could never, ever be unbundled from the console and has become not just an afterthought, but now an unsupported afterthought.  The Xbox One S and Xbox One X hardware revisions did away with the built-in Kinect port and instead required a proprietary USB adapter to use the add-on, and now that adapter has been discontinued entirely.  This essentially scuttles the Kinect for good.  Samit Sarkar at Polygon reports.

“After careful consideration, we decided to stop manufacturing the Xbox Kinect Adapter to focus attention on launching new, higher fan-requested gaming accessories across Xbox One and Windows 10,” a Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement to Polygon. As for any plans to bring back the item in the future, the representative declined to discuss Microsoft’s product roadmap, but said the adapter “will no longer be available.”

We've come a long way from the motion control madness kicked off by the Nintendo Wii which led to both Sony and Microsoft playing catch-up with ways to wave your arms around in front of a television while a perfectly good traditional controller sat nearby.  More than a decade after Wii, Sony and Nintendo have backed down to building motion control technology into those traditional controllers to find a happy compromise between moving and not, while Microsoft ran headlong into Kinect territory only to find that the market really just wanted a happy compromise.