Q&A: What next for Xbox?
Published: 13 Mar 2002 17:39 GMT
ZDNet UK's gaming site, GameSpot UK, recently met with J Allard, general manager for the Xbox platform at Microsoft, and Michel Cassius, director of publishing for Xbox Europe. On the agenda was the European launch of the console and plans for the subsequent introduction of online gaming on Xbox.
GameSpot UK: Were you pleased with the US Xbox launch?
J Allard: The US launch was a great success. At E3 we promised that we would shift between 1.1 and 1.5 million consoles -- we ended up closing the year with 1.5 million consoles sold, which is great. We launched with eighteen games -- we thought we would only have fifteen, but ended up with eighteen. We sold more units of software per Xbox than GameCube or PlayStation ever have. I think the biggest point in terms of success in the US is how strong the first-party titles came through. Halo has just been an earth-shattering success. Very few consoles have launched with a game on day one that shifts over a million units -- Halo is well on its way. It's a phenomenal game.
Project Gotham was a bit of a surprise for everyone -- that game came together very well in the end stages and that turned out to be the number two title. That's a fantastic game. The third game was Dead Or Alive 3 -- those are the top three. All the third-party publishers are really pleased with their performance. Any publishers that shifted on Xbox and GameCube did better on Xbox, even though GameCube had almost as many hardware units. It's just been great.
Not only did we meet all our objectives for 2001 but met them so strong that really all the third-party publishers have just doubled down on our commitment -- they feel very, very good about Xbox. And any fears that people had -- too PC, not having enough first-party, not having a good commitment for third-party, higher price versus GameCube -- all those fears are gone. So now we just really look forward to the future. I think 2002 means three things -- it means Japan, it means Europe, and it means online. Those are the big objectives for our team.
Michel Cassius: There will be fifteen games at launch, in sixteen countries. We're on track -- we've got manufacturing over here, we're producing something like fifteen thousand units a day.
We're going to have around seven thousand kiosks over here where people can actually play -- I think there's one in HMV Oxford Street. Everybody was around it, wanting to play. It's great because the US launch was good -- that's kind of a springboard for us.
JA: So things are going very, very well. We have plenty of chips, plenty of demand -- we're just not making them fast enough. So that's my big challenge this year -- to up the supply because the demand is too high right now.
The other thing is online. The vision with online has been to take videogaming an evolutionary step forwards -- that was always our dream. You can't do that with graphics - clearly the graphics capabilities of Xbox are superior, it's the most powerful graphics processor in the industry. That's not revolutionary. The revolutionary step in our view is online. In the very beginning of the Xbox dream we put everything we needed for online into the box -- unfortunately it was impossible for us to wrap everything up in the online service, to make that available for launch, but it will be ready this year.
JA: But you can't create experiences (where every player on a football field is controlled by a different gamer) on a modem. So we decided to bet on the future instead of against it. The second slot in the controller lets you add a voice protocol, which has been in development for over a year. The engineering team that's working on online is actually bigger than the team that's working on console itself. So we're making a huge investment, to allow a very simple vision -- so that you can be Dark Master in all the games that you play, so that you can invite your friends across games, so that you can use the voice masking and have voice in games, and be able to work on a global basis. It's a lot of work. Integration with mobile phones so that you can get notifications on your PCs -- those are all planned aspects of the service. No matter where you are you can be connected back to your Xbox online experience, and then once you're connected it's very, very natural.
GSUK: Why the emphasis on the voice headset?
JA: What we've found in early trials is that voice is just essential. If you think about a real Formula One race, where Michael Schumacher can't talk to the pits, that's trouble. Or in a football game if the players can't communicate with each other, it would just make the sport impossible. And so with sport in videogames, it's just ridiculous to think that you wouldn't be able to communicate with voice and achieve similar feats in a global community. We're off to a very good start with this. The network will be live on a global basis before the end of this year.
GSUK: How good has the third-party publisher response been to the online games? We were surprised that Tony Hawk's 3 doesn't support online on Xbox.
JA: Well it's a matter of timing, not a matter of desire. The support's been phenomenal -- we've had over twenty-five publishers who have pledged their support to the online titles. We have about twenty-five titles now in development. It's going to be a modern introduction -- it's not going to be like a console launch. It's not going to be, hey, here's Xbox, here's the graphics chip, here's the programming libraries -- go make games like you've made games before. Most console developers haven't done online before and don't yet know how to think about it. And online gaming is relatively new in general. The publishers all know it's the future -- they're all wildly enthusiastic about it.
If you think about the potency of a television series versus a movie -- you get much more life cycle out of a series that runs well. And so publishers look at this and say wow, we can do a mission of the week. Instead of saying we can spend $10 making one game, and it can be either a hit or a flop, we can spend $3 to develop, say, three levels, and if it's a hit they'll go to the level of the month. So you spread out the development cost and spread out the risk.
GSUK: Presumably you're planning to charge something for add-ons?
JA: Well, we haven't finalised the price but we are hearing from gamers that what they'd like is something like how cable television works, where you pay a flat rate where you get all that you expect, and if you want premium services, OK. There will be opportunities though for massively multiplayer games which will probably require additional subscriptions. There are going to be tournaments, and the ability to purchase new levels and tracks. For the most part we want it to be an inclusive system.
GSUK: Do you see a shift towards PC-style gaming on Xbox with an accompaniment for online?
JA: A lot of categories on consoles that haven't been popular on PC haven't really been explored online. Imagine you can only solve a puzzle when you pick up your friend. Imagine co-operative platform games, imagine 11-on-11 football games. The games that are most popular haven't been experience in any way online or on PC. So we're really looking forward to that. Massively multiplayer games, first person shooters - we expect them to come over in force, as Halo has demonstrated for those first-person guys on PC.
GSUK: Is a broadband connection really feasible across Europe?
JA: It's going to be trickier in Europe, I think because of the standards in Europe. On the other hand because in Europe there are so few telecommunication companies per country it's much more straightforward to make agreements with them. The thing we've seen in the States is that the early Xbox purchasers have a tendency to have broadband. So we've seen over thirty per cent of Xbox owners today having broadband, versus the less than ten per cent across America. So hopefully that trend continues in Europe. And if you consider that for a second, thirty percent of 1.5 million is five hundred thousand customers that I can target with my broadband game today.
By the end of June we're going to have six million consoles out there. If again it's twenty or thirty per cent, that's two or three million gamers out there that you can start thinking about for the Christmas season as a game designer. And that's a huge audience. When we talk to the cable and telecommunication companies they say that's the killer act - today broadband is being driven by convenience. Now you can order your books faster on the Web. But the reality is all the services on the Web have been designed around the modem experience. So it actually doesn't get that much better. It's not like when you plug in broadband all of a sudden there's a new way to do books. It doesn't change, it just gets a little bit faster. So that value doesn't actually change.
But this is a brand new service, a whole new reason to go buy it.
GSUK: Do you think console gamers will be quick to embrace online gaming?
JA: I think there will initially be some early gamers who will benefit from broadband, and then there will be a smash-hit game, that everybody wants. And you'll have that phenomenon where some gamers feel left out because the number one selling game is now an online game. And then eventually it will come to the point where every game is online. Nobody's ever been able to show me a videogame and say "this game doesn't make sense online." There's always something that you can do online. If you go through an arcade, it's Dance Dance Revolution and Daytona USA, all side-by-side. People want to play side-by-side, they want to play against each other. They want to have that social experience. So we put the four ports on front because we give the gamer credit and say, "you probably have more than one friend" and a four-player game is actually fine. But we didn't want to stop there. It was natural to stop at four because couches are only so big, and living rooms are only so big. But we wanted to go beyond that, and that's what online is all about. I think every game will become online. Is it five years, is it six years, is it seven years? I don't know, but we hope to be the ones that start it.
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