no, no i can't see their thought process behind this they have potentially limited many creative people from finding more genuinely useful features for the kinect. it has very limited use in gaming if any and to make it mandatory and prevent other people from using they have potentially killed their own product most if not all the games for kinect have either consisted of shouting, leaning left and right jumping up and down, dancing or fitness. you can hardly call that gaming

What is not to understand the thought process?

Xbox One with the Kinect as a bundle probably means loss or almost no profit. If you bought it to work it on a PC, you aren't really an Xbox customer.

With all the research MS put in to make one of the most advanced cameras around, the cost is cheap. You actually get two Kinect, one early release and a final product. So the actual cost is probably at cost for MS.

This is what they said with the original Kinect until third party drivers came about which allowed it to work on PCs

I'm guessing that they don't want people messing up the console kinect, and then dealing with a console that no longer works.

That's the sad part about it, they're probably going to charge people twice for the same thing due to that proprietary connector.

Which is quite lame IMO, not that I use the system but I don't condone such behavior either.
A handful of interesting stuff came to be due to users toying with the system on their PC.

MS probably don't want people hacking the Kinect 2 which in turn open up possible hacking of the XB1. But I say, if there's a will there's a way, for hackers to bypass this problem.

really, you think the fact that Kinect always has to be connected & functioning for the Xbone to work is acceptable? LOL

There is a reason why a German government official called the Xbone a surveillance device. They know a lot more than you.

I personally just simply don't want it.

Yet if I want a Xbox One, I'd HAVE to have it.

I don't like that.

As for the spying, the fact that MS was involved with that NSA nonsense I wouldn't be surprised. What they would look for?

Ways to tailor advertisements to fit you better, see what products you use in your house while you game or watch your TV and Sports...and what you talk about when you are on Skype.

Not saying I believe that, but hey anything's possible.

Thats what I keep asking Bigpappy but I have never gotten an intelligent response.....just "I dont want it spying on me", meanwhile millions have had kinect their homes for quite awhile now like me with it "kinected" the whole time with no problems. Its funny because if you go back and look at old posts concerning kinect it was the same fear tactics....nothing happened but once again of course "OMG watch out micro wants to spy on us" lol as if they are important....I swear sonyfanboys must all be living duoble lives as secret agents.

Don't kill the messenger...please. But, here it is in a nutshell. The original idea for the Kinect 2 integration was not just about games, but about Kinect 2 being able to sense facial expressions, moods, even heartbeat changes. Folks found that MS had made some deals with some ad firm to sell metadata to them that would be uploaded from Kinect. This was NOT pictures of you, or sound clips. It was more about responses to things. How many people are present when you game? Did you smile when a commercial was advertised? This metadata is of utmost importance to ad execs because they pay crap-loads of money for this type of information. Then, the PRISM scandal hit with MS being involved (I believe through Windows). So, on the extreme side MS wants to watch your every move. On the conservative side, they want your data so that they can show you ads that you may like. I think it's somewhere in the middle. Make some cash off of metadata to push ads that they think would apply to you.

These declines are on the back of extra revenue received from releasing games like Forza horizon 5 on PlayStation. So I’m being sarcastic here when I said they should go back to exclusives. Killing off a revenue stream from Ps5 sales will only make things worse