Xbox Series X won’t support Kinect hardware, games

Always watching. Top to bottom: PlayStation Eye (PS3), Playstation Camera (PS4), Xbox 360 Kinect, Xbox One Kinect. (credit: Kyle Orland)

Roughly one year ago, Microsoft revealed the Xbox Series X (then referred to as "Project Scarlett") in part by highlighting the system's extensive backward compatibility: "Your games, your achievements, your progression, your accessories, your console experience with Xbox: it all comes forward with Scarlett." Today, though, the company emphasized one slight exception to that general backward-compatibility rule: Kinect hardware and the games designed for it.

"It's our intent for all Xbox One games that do not require Kinect to play on Xbox Series X at the launch of the console [emphasis added]," Microsoft Head of Xbox Phil Spencer wrote in a sentence buried in an extensive blog post about the company's Xbox plans (including coming xCloud integration with Game Pass). Spencer later confirmed and clarified that statement to The Verge, saying point-blank that "[t]here's no way for Kinect to work" on the Series X.

In a sense, today's confirmation isn't a big surprise. We've known for months that the Series X is missing the proprietary Kinect port found on the original Xbox One (which was also removed from 2016's Xbox One S and 2017's Xbox One X). But Microsoft offered a USB adapter for the Xbox One edition of the Kinect until 2018, and third-party accessory makers still offer similar USB solutions for the hardware (the Xbox 360 version of Kinect was designed for USB but required an included power adapter to work with older versions of the console).