Microsoft’s Kinect 2 for Windows went on pre-order this weekend, and Microsoft has published an extensive piece on how it built Kinect’s capabilities, functions, and sophisticated software body tracking. For showcasing the system’s impressive capabilities, Microsoft picked developer Freak’n’Genius — a developer whose previous YaKit application is designed to animate the mouth of a still photo to make it look like a painting or animal is actually talking.

This is the fundamental problem Microsoft has always struggled with where Kinect is concerned. Watch the company’s videos and demonstrations of Kinect 2.0 features (embedded below), and it’s obvious that the company has poured huge amounts of time and effort into building smarter software that can monitor and respond to much more subtle movements than the original camera. Companies actually working with the tech, however, have mostly used it for simple effects and cheap tricks.

According to Microsoft, it’s spent the nine months since Kinect 2.0 debuted polishing the software, modeling the movements and actions of specific individuals, and teaching the system how to distinguish between people and furniture, where motions stop and start, and which parts of the body to watch when measuring movement. There’s a huge lab in the Redmond headquarters where two dozen infrared cameras were used to capture specific movements, like swinging a baseball bat, to teach the software how to recognize the movement from every angle.

This is impressive work but it’s work in search of a purpose. For all the time sunk into making Kinect function properly, Microsoft’s decision to unbundle the camera from the Xbox One is an admission that no game developer has come up with a plan to make the device shine in a shipping title. It’s telling that some of the biggest demos are coming from outside the entertainment market, in areas like healthcare, where the camera’s monitoring capabilities can be used to ensure patients perform physical therapy exercises correctly.

The central problem of Kinect is that Microsoft built a device that could capture human movement and translate it into software without ever apparently asking if that capability was a good fit for modern gaming. Abstracting away all buttons and other control mechanisms might sound interesting in theory, but in practice contextual “Interact” buttons and hard-mapped functions (Jump, Shoot, etc) are a remarkably efficient way to control a game. Remove them, and you’re forced to map every single capability to a physical movement. That requires a fundamental rethink of the entire process and it’s extremely difficult to justify reinventing a game control mechanism from scratch while simultaneously supporting conventional controller play.

This leaves Microsoft leaning on non-game developers, hoping that someone will create a use case for Kinect 2.0 that actually sparks adoption. It’s impossible to not be impressed with the enormous amount of effort Microsoft has sunk into Kinect, but with the company retreating from the camera as a mandatory attachment for the Xbox One (even if that’s the smart move financially), it’s equally impossible not to ask how much future it has. If MS had kept its own game studios in-house, it could have easily pushed at least some teams to adopt the product, but without that lever Kinect seems likely to vanish off the market — the ultimate solution in search of a problem.