Microsoft Interview Summer 2006

Microsoft bigwigs Shane Kim (the games guy), Todd Holmdahl (the product guy) and Richard Teversham (the marketing guy) take time out with us to talk in-depth about Xbox 360 strategy and plans for the future.

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Kikizo: Is it a danger that by giving independent developers these tools that they could us them to develop for something MS has nothing to do with?

Holmdahl: I suppose that's always out there. I think they're going to find that the platforms we support are very prominent platforms that allow you to have a great experience, and they're going to want to stay with those platforms.

Kikizo: XNA is alive and well, but publicly we hear a lot less about it these days compared to the noise that was made back in 2004.

Holmdahl: XNA is a big part of my group; one of the objectives of the platform group is to ensure that game developers have the best platforms to make great games and XNA is a big part of allowing that to happen. We demonstrated a couple of cross-platform demos back at GDC, showing stuff running on the Xbox 360 as well as the PC. I can't remember the name of it, this was a prototype game, and you had this world, you planted seeds, and the flowers would pop out of the seeds and develop and continue to grow, and really, it was done in a very short period of time - the people developing it wrote the code so that it could be run on a PC as well as an Xbox 360 with virtually no modifications.

People are starting to really understand the framework we have built. We've put up the source code for MechAssault, so people can go around and see the different things that we're doing with XNA. People are out there actively downloading the samples we have available, and already use it.

Kikizo: How does the Live Anywhere vision fit into or benefit from these workings?

Holmdahl: Live Anywhere, in my mind, allows people to have one identity, one Gamerscore, one set of friends, as they so choose, and they can have that on different devices. A PC device, an Xbox 360, a mobile device. Let's take a casual game - I can buy it once, and if I have this Live service to back it up, I can play it on my PC, I can play it on my mobile device, I can play it on my Xbox 360. Or I can play half of it on my PC and half of it on my mobile device. And then, where XNA starts to tie into this, now I'm writing this code for this casual game, Instead of having to write it for 3 separate devices, I have to write it just once. We're going to have 6 million Live subscribers by next June, and 10 million customers by this holiday, and now, instead of having the Xbox 360 installed base, now I have a much larger installed base, going through the mobile space and also to the PC space.

Richard Teversham, Director of Platform & Marketing, Home and Entertainment Division, Microsoft EMEA

Kikizo: Is it about providing a choice of platform, or more about forcing people into owning and using multiple systems operated by you?

Holmdahl: My guess is that the majority of people will want to have an experience that spans all these devices, that allows you to go off and look at your friends, talk to your friends, whether on your PC or your phone. Play the game on the move that you played part way through on your PC. That's kind of a killer app. What you try to do with any product is develop a value proposition that's meaningful to the customer, and you try to develop a strategy, a differentiating strategy, with respect to your competition. And what we're doing here, the stuff that we're talking about is very meaningful for the consumer. I don't think there's anybody else that can do what we're doing. And from a business proposition, a business strategy will follow.

Kikizo: Do you have any further details on the exclusive episodic content announced with Rockstar?

Kim: I don't have any details on that, but I will say that announcement is huge. If you think back to the role that GTA3 played in PS2's success, now that title is no longer exclusive to the PS3. So the thirdparty playing field is now much more level.

Kikizo: In terms of the HD-DVD drive, is there an issue with background noise? You get less noise on the 360 when you're playing a DVD, but you still get quite a lot of noise. Is that going to be an issue with the HD-DVD drive?

Holmdahl: The main thing that we're doing is trying to minimize that, and we believe we have a good solution to do that. We have a high-definition video experience, and a high-definition audio experience that you get with HD-DVD. We want to ensure that the mechanical experience matches that, so that's our target.

Kikizo: For Europe, the adoption rate for Xbox 360 is lower than it is in the US - there were shortages in the US for far longer than there were in Europe. Why do you think that was?

Teversham: It's because we shipped more units into Europe, because Europe is a key territory.

Kikizo: We understood that similar numbers were shipped both for the US and for Europe.

Teversham: We prioritized Europe as a key territory, and wanted to make sure we brought as many consoles into Europe as possible, across the board - southern Europe, northern Europe, central Europe. We've got to make sure that we have consoles that people could buy. And even then, you'd have been very luck to find one in store back in January. We've got to continue the momentum we've already gained. Now the price points are right out there, everyone will see them. We've got an amazing price point, the value for money from Xbox 360 is now unbeatable, because we now know where the competition price point is set.

Kikizo: Are you looking to acquire further talent like Lionhead within Europe?

Teversham: A lot of companies are always looking for great talent. And when it comes along and the time is right to make an acquisition, or potentially just use developers like Bizarre, it's depends on the situation is at the time. But we want the best talent working on Xbox 360, it's that simple. But the fix has got to be right. If you think about Peter Molyneux, his creative sort of genius, along with Microsoft's future-looking console and Live, came together, and it was just a really good fit. And you talk to Peter about it, he's really happy about the future of that relationship. Fable was wonderful, and Fable 2 will be even better. So we feel really lucky to have him in Microsoft Game Studios.

We've not got games like Lost Planet from the Japanese publishers, and we've got a huge amount of European developers - and I think just the roster of talent developing for the 360 is unbeatable. What's great is that we're bringing fresh franchises, new franchises - and if you think about the last three years, we brought so many new franchises, which are now massive to Xbox. This is only going to be good for our future.

Kikizo: What will please fans most about Halo 3?

Kim: I think it's easily going to be the most anticipated title in the industry. It was great for us to get that out there, confirm that Halo 3 is coming, it's going to be the third chapter in the trilogy, Master Chief's going to come back to finish the fight... so it's awesome that this anticipation, lust and thirst for more information is just going to build up. Hopefully it puts to bed any concerns about what Bungie's doing in the Halo universe. They're very focused on Halo 3, they're going to make it bigger and better and everything that people expect from the next instantiation in that franchise. Bungie and Microsoft Game Studios, we're completely focused on doing the very best for Halo 3 for our customers. Whenever that title comes, I'm very confident that it's going to be the right time for us versus the competition.

Kikizo: Would it have been sensible to release Halo 3 this year?

Kim: Well, I think the important thing is that Halo 3 is going to come out when it's ready, and I'm sure I speak for all the people who love the Halo franchise, they'd love to have Halo 3 sooner rather than later in general, and that was the case with Halo 2 as well, if you remember. I think it's going to help us this year, though, because everybody understands that the only place that you can play Gears of War, Halo 3 and Grand Theft Auto IV is going to be Xbox 360, and that's going to factor into people's decision-making when they decide whether or not to buy an Xbox 360 or a PS3 this year. Gears of War, I think, is shaping up to be the next big blockbuster in the industry. And it's exclusive to us, of course. So from a content standpoint, that's why I believe we have the very best content from an exclusive content standpoint on Xbox 360.

Kikizo Staff
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