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Wednesday, October 05, 2005
X05: A Conversation With Robbie Bach, Chief Xbox Officer
Dean Takahashi, 10:48 AM in Dean Takahashi, Gaming
I rounded out a long day of checking out MS Xbox 360 games in Amsterdam in a small group conversation with Robbie Bach, chief Xbox officer.
It was a very stuffy room that Robbie had been locked in all day. "I'm having fun but it's hot," Bach said. I sat with Seth Scheisel of the New York Times, Geoff Keighley of G4 TV among other news outlets, and another journalist I didn't know.
Robbie took so many questions that day he told us the format was to go around the room. Keighley tossed the first set of questions at Robbie about MS's decision to support the HD-DVD format for next-generation high-definition video disks instead of Sony's BluRay rival technology. Here are some tidbits from the conversation.
He noted that Paramount was supporting both formats and, like other studios, would likely want to see which hardware gets to the market faster and at the right price.
"So prove it, they're saying," Robbie said. "See what gets to the market. See what they cost to manufacture. See what they cost to produce." Robbie said it was an uncertain environment and he said MS chose to side with HD-DVD because it wasn't comfortable with the direction that BluRay was heading in terms of a copy-protection scheme. But would not say whether MS would eventually start shipping Xbox 360 consoles with HD-DVD drives instead of the current planned DVD drives.
I asked Robbie what the toughest decisions MS had to make this time around in the development of the Xbox 360. He said that early on selecting the chip vendors was tough because moving away from Intel and Nvidia meant that the company would have a tough time with backward compatibility. But he said that the advantages of going with IBM and ATI outweighed the obstacles. MS chose them because of the better ability to customize the hardware, the move to multiple cores on a chip, and overall performance.
Robbie also said that launching in all three major regions at once at the same time was also a decision that taxed the resources of the team. It was difficult to decide it was going to happen on time in every territory no matter what.
Later he said that it wouldn't be easy to keep supplies from running out in all the territories. MS plans to resupply them more quickly than Sony typically does. But he said that demand will likely outstrip MS's ability to ship units, at least until more factory capacity comes online in January and February.He said the actual supplies would be dependent on chip yields and needs of each market.
Robbie said that there were more decisions made at lower levels than when MS began planning the original Xbox, which debuted in 2001. That reflected the growing experience of the team, he said.
Asked about backward compatibility, Robbie said he couldn't answer now. He said that in two to four weeks, MS would announce which games from the old Xbox would run on the new console. He said MS created an "engine" to make some of the old games work. But he said that the list of games would be based on popularity, whether it has a big Xbox Live component and therefore was still being played, and ones without a sequel coming soon.
Robbie also declined to comment on how many units MS would supply to all the territories
and what the sales forecasts were for each region. There's not a lot of benefit to it, he said, and a lot of critics simply use the number to hold Robbie accountable to them later.
Asked if MS had to sacrifice certain functions because they were too expensive, Robbie said MS included most of the "use scenarios" that it envisioned for the box, ranging from doing massively multiplayer online games on the box to not requiring a credit card for Xbox Live online subscriptions. He said that he wished that MS could have allowed songs in Apple's own formats for the iPod to play on the Xbox 360, but that decision was out of MS's hands. (The Xbox 360 can play songs in Windows Media and MP3 formats).
Robbie said that there were never any plans to show a planned Marvel comic book heroes online game
at X05. He said that MS would decide in the next few days what titles would be available on the first day of the launch. That, he said, was dependent on the certification process which isn't done yet.
I asked a few questions about making money. Was it possible to make money if MS came
in second place? Was MS trying for an "early rush," or beating the other guys with speed to market, and were making money and gaining market share mutually exclusive?
Robbie said that Nintendo makes money on smaller volumes of console sales, so it was possible
to make money without being in first place. "Selling more consoles helps, but it's not the only thing in our business model," he said. "If you're silly, you can be a high-volume company that is unprofitable." He said MS designed the box in a different way this time and that it would allow for better cost reduction over time.
Since there is no "Halo" title available for launch, Keighley asked whether MS had a killer application this time. Robbie said that there were many more titles that had the potential to be killer titles this time around, since there was a much wider selection. He said that third-party game publishers were happier that their games would have a better chance to gain attention, since there was no Halo. He took a little jab at Sony and said that it never produced a game like Halo in its own studios at all. He didn't consider Sony's "Gran Turismo" to be such a game, and he said it was really more Rockstar's "Grand Theft Auto" series that made the PlayStation 2 successful. He noted that Ubisoft's "Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell" was key to the first Xbox's sales because it showed there was a second game besides Halo that made the console worth buying.
He said that launching without Halo 3 was good for the Xbox 360, since the Halo title will sell well whenever it launches and that's good for the console to emerge as something more than a Halo machine. It's a chance, he said, for original titles to shine. He said that MS would not tie Halo 3's launch to Sony's launch of the PS 3. Even though MS Chairman Bill Gates said that, Robbie said that the Bungie studio making Halo 3 would finish when it decided it was done. Releasing the Halo movie at the same time would be nice, but he said that either would be strong enough to launch on their own if needed.
As for its share of developers, Robbie said that MS's allies were growing, as evidenced by how many more Xbox 360 development kits had shipped compared to its rivals. (of course, it's farther along than the other guys). "We have a lot more mindshare in Japan," he said. And he noted the additions of Epic Games, id Software, Bioware, and Infinity Ward with major new commitments to the Xbox 360.
http://blogs.mercurynews.com/aei/2005/10/x..._conversat.html 
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