In a bit of surprising news, Microsoft announced today that their Xbox Fitness product is being discontinued.

Effective immediately, you won’t be able to purchase Xbox Fitness content, although existing users of Xbox Fitness will be able to continue to play the content they’ve purchased for a year, through June 30, 2017. But on July 1, 2017, Xbox Fitness will be removed completely and not available for anyone to download or play.

Those with Xbox Gold will still be able to play the 30+ workouts for free until December 15, 2016.

It’s a bit of shocking news, and if you read the comments on the blog post, you’ll see that a lot of people who purchased Xbox Fitness content (in some cases hundreds of dollars worth) are pretty upset. Usually when a game is no longer supported, those who paid for it would still be able to play it offline. That doesn’t seem to be the case here–it looks like on 7/1/17, they’re pulling the plug on the service–and the rug from under everyone who believed in it.

I would hope that at the very least Microsoft would provide some kind of compensation for the many who poured their hearts and their wallets into this product over the last two and a half years. I know for a fact that many people, including many readers of this blog, purchased their Xbox One primarily because of its potential in workout and fitness.

The good news is that there are still excellent options if you want to use your Xbox One for fitness–Kung Fu Live and Shape Up being two of them. And rest assured, as long as publishers continue to develop games for the Kinect that get you moving, I’ll still cover them here.