After seeing this site and then the comments here, I am coming out of this with the general sentiment that Microsoft is genuinely thoughtful about addressing end-of-life products.
Their transition into the paid/enterprise space is very interesting. I'm very excited for them to find a non-advertising revenue stream, as it could help Google to stop being evil. They're still a very amazing company.
However, their approach providing free services is a bit subpar. I've ran into so many table-stake bugs that simply don't exist in MSFT offerings (e.g. copy/paste between Google office applications often breaks formatting).
Thanks to our mid-size enterprise contract, I can get someone to tell me that not enough people are complaining about it for them to fix it. Meanwhile, from asking my teams at work, everyone struggles with lack of polish across their applications.
You can buy USB cameras from Intel and Logitech with comparable sensor packages to a Kinect.
For Microsoft's hardware efforts that is often seen as its own win when they can take something people don't know they need, package it in a commodity way to get competitors to take interest and build their own versions:
The scroll wheel on the mouse went from an R&D project at Microsoft to the Office team realizing it was the future of productivity and bundling mice with scroll wheels with Office to now just about no manufacturer would think to build a mouse without a scroll wheel.
The Kinect used console gaming as a trojan horse to commoditize thousands of dollars of lab sensors into an integrated $150 accessory to the Xbox 360 and now there are versions of that sensor package in laptops and smartphones and VR headsets and so much more. Kinect as a gaming brand may be dead (for now? AR/MR gaming has always been one for recurring fads, it may come around again, who knows), but the legacy of Kinect lives on in hardware all around us. The hardware didn't just go back to being thousands of dollars of lab equipment, it became part of the computing atmosphere around us. That's an incredibly interesting and weird win that a lot of people wouldn't necessarily credit Microsoft for being such a lever, such an instigator of change/innovation, such a bridge between R&D dreams and "background" reality.
(ETA: Microsoft still sometimes uses the IntelliMouse brand as a bit of a retro-throwback, but the above analogy does help show how much that brand is very related to the Kinect brand. Almost every mouse today is an "IntelliMouse" under the original brand meaning. The brand did its job so successfully to point where people don't even sometimes remember the brand, other than sometimes retro-hardware fans.)
Really nice price too, while being (based on a bit of research) much more powerful than the old Kinect.
I'm not offering judgment on whether they ought or ought not to, I'm merely observing that they have power and are exercising it as they choose.
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/architecture-and-tec...
Creators will absolutely pay a premium for such tech when the alternative goes for thousands of dollars (a quick google shows these devices selling on the order of 2000 to 7000+ USD). The SDK alone would generate much more value for such a product.
VR definitely killed any interest in the "core" gaming market, but I think the uses of motion tracking is a completely separate audience from VR anyway. Without some dedicated apparel, a VR kit can only track your eyes and hands. motion tracking gives you so much more data to work with, for potentially multiple subjects as well. People working with that data will easily pay themselves back with whatever they develop with it, which is why maybe a licensing deal (similar to Unity/Unreal Engine) may be a better way to monetize .
Is it alive? It very much has an immensely passionate community of students and hobbyists using it in ways well past its intended use (e.g. it's some of the cheapest mocap hardware you can buy). But I don't think you've been able to officially purchase one for 4+ years now. Hard to call that "alive" in a business sense.
Honestly a real shame that Xbox hasn't pivoted it into some other team that can market it towards creators. In particular the whole "VTuber" phenomenon may benefit form a cheap(ish), dedicated motion tracking device instead of relying on a high end iPhone or fanagling with some generic webcam.