Microsoft Decides to Shut down Xbox Fitness

It’s no big secret that Microsoft’s Kinect camera is slowly becoming more and more obsolete, and Microsoft is definitely well-aware of this fact as well, which is why it’s shutting down various services that require this feature in order to function properly. One of these services is Xbox Fitness, which is scheduled to be shut down progressively over the next year according to a recent announcement released by Microsoft Studios. Xbox Fitness was initially launched alongside the Xbox One, and it used a second-generation Kinect camera in order to keep track of things such as the user’s burned calories and heart rate during exercises.

New workouts and other features were fed into the service regularly via updates, but Microsoft now feels that it is no longer worth it to update Fitness, which is why it has removed it from the Xbox Store. Those who have already purchased the app can still use it until June 30th, 2017, but users who have already purchased workouts will not likely get their money’s worth in this timeframe. Still, since the overall user base for Xbox Fitness was never really that large in the first place, Microsoft’s decision kind of makes sense. At the time of writing, few Xbox apps actually make use of Kinect’s motion-tracking capabilities, which means that the product is likely to reach the end of its days soon enough.