Xbox Fitness

» see xbox.com/en-us/fitness as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

xbox fitness landed on 22 november 2013 as one of the twenty-two launch titles for the xbox one. it was the software half of microsoft's big pitch for Kinect 2.0. the new sensor was going to see your skeleton in the room and read your heart rate off skin tone changes, counting calories while grading your form against a celebrity trainer on the tv. the app streamed licensed workout videos from Jillian Michaels alongside Tracy Anderson plus Tony Horton of P90X and Shaun T of Insanity. free through december 2014 for xbox live gold members.

the whole thing depended on the Kinect being a real product. by mid-2014 microsoft had already unbundled Kinect from the xbox one to bring the console price down under the ps4. by 2016 the Kinect adapter was quietly discontinued. once the sensor was optional the fitness pitch collapsed. microsoft announced the shutdown on 27 june 2016 and gave users a year of grace before pulling the servers on 1 july 2017.

Kinect fitness was one of those consumer categories that only made sense from a US english-speaking suburban-house-with-a-tv-in-the-living-room angle. the app was licensed for a handful of countries and never opened in Turkey. i was 29 when it launched, working in ankara, no xbox one at home. this is the pattern i knew about from tech press coverage and did not participate in.

~ the record ~

~ the early days ~

xbox fitness was pitched at Microsoft's build 2013 as evidence that Kinect 2.0 was going to be a general-purpose camera for a new class of software. the sensor was the entire pitch. the workouts were a proof point. Sumo Digital built the app under Microsoft Studios. every session tracked your position in the room and mapped it onto a silhouette on the right side of the screen, with muscle groups lighting up as you engaged them. the heart-rate read was the party trick, and it did actually work.

the launch catalog had P90X videos ported to the xbox one interface with real-time coaching layered on top. Jillian Michaels shot new content specifically for the app. the workouts ran ten minutes at the short end to a full hour at the long end. individual workouts sold as microtransactions after the initial gold-subscription window closed at the end of 2014.

~ what really happened ~

the collapse was fast. microsoft ripped Kinect out of the box in june 2014 as part of a price cut to compete with sony. that decision quietly killed the platform strategy. by 2015 the xbox one games shipping with Kinect features could be counted on one hand. by 2016 the accessory adapter for using an original Kinect on the xbox one s was discontinued. once the sensor was optional the whole software category had no reason to exist.

the shutdown announcement came 27 june 2016 through the xbox wire blog. microsoft said the app would keep working for a full year, until 1 july 2017. new purchases were disabled that day. workouts already bought stayed accessible until the shutdown date. after 1 july 2017 the app disconnected from the server and refused to boot. every workout users had paid for was gone. no refunds, no offline mode for anything the shutdown had swept up.

~ what got buried with it ~

xbox fitness was the last serious attempt to sell fitness content on a console. the pattern died with the Wii Fit generation and never came back. by 2017 fitness content had moved onto phone screens and youtube and later peloton, all of which assumed the workout happened somewhere without a game console attached. the sensor-camera-in-the-living-room premise never returned outside of VR headsets, and even those focused on games instead of guided exercise.

the more instructive part of the grave is what happened to the workouts. Jillian Michaels and Tony Horton kept their content libraries and licensed them onwards. microsoft paid to produce them, licensed them for the app's lifetime, then lost access at shutdown. the users who paid for the same content lost access at the same moment. the license structure was a rental all along.

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