Xbox One sales 'more than double' after Microsoft drops Kinect motion sensor

Unbundling the Kinect also lowered the Xbox's price to match that of the PS4

Sony’s PlayStation 4 is still beating the Xbox One in the console war, but it seem that Microsoft has finally found a way to fight back: dropping the Kinect.

Since the company chose to drop the sensor from the Xbox One package and lower the price to equal that of the PS4 ($399 in the US and £350 in the UK) sales of the device have “more than doubled”.

This is good news for Microsoft, which has been dominated by its rival in the hardware charts for the past five consecutive months. The latest figures show that the PS4 is even outpacing the PS2’s sales in its early days – still the best selling console of all time.

The Kinect was originally bundled with the Xbox One in order to reassure developers that any motion-sensing capabilities they chose to put in their games would find an audience able to access them.

This unbundling of the Kinect means this is no longer the case, although Microsoft are insistent that they are committed to the peripheral. In an interview with Tech Radar, Microsoft’s UK Xbox marketing director Harvey Eagle said that the Kinect bundle was actually claiming the “lion’s share of sales”.

"I think people are seeing the value of for 50 quid more I can get Kinect with it and it can do a bunch of cool things,” said Eagle.