Get ready for a long read...enjoy.
With less than two months to go before Xbox 360 launches in Europe, we caught up with MSs chief Xbox officer Robbie Bach at the consoles European preview event, X05, to find out how the launch is shaping up, and what his hopes are for the early performance of the platform.
GamesIndustry.biz: There was a lot of talk during the X05 presentations about a commitment to Europe, and youre launching the console here just days after the US launch how are we going to see that developing over the lifespan of the console? Are we going to see software coming out here pretty much at the same time as the USA? Is that a commitment youre prepared to make?
Robbie Bach: Certainly from a strategy level, our goal is to treat all our markets, where we produce a title that makes sense in that market sometimes titles just dont make sense in certain markets but assuming that were going to produce a title for North America and Europe, our goal is to produce those titles so that they ship as close to exactly the same time as possible.
Occasionally, well execute badly. That does happen every once in a while. Some of the titles require a lot of language localisation and sometimes thats a little tricky, but thats certainly our goal. Its our view that when we ship, say, Project Gotham Racing 3 in North America, we want that to be available in Europe at the same time.
It probably wont end up being the exact same day it turns out that retailers in the different countries work differently, so the ideal day to ship in the US isnt the same as the ideal day in Europe, but for all intents and purposes we want this to be as close as possible, and were working with our publishing partners to encourage them to do the same. Were trying to provide tools and certification so that that isnt the cause of the delay, were trying to do all the things that we can in the ecosystem to make it easy for people to do that.
It is something that takes a little bit of work, and so, will we execute perfectly on it right out of the gate? Probably not. Will we see, over the life cycle, people saying wow, things have changed, theyre really treating Europe like a main market like the main market that it is? I think absolutely, they definitely will.
How would you respond to the concerns weve all been hearing from retailers about the size of their allocations of Xbox 360 for Christmas?
I think the reality, when you launch new products like this any time you have a product that has as much pent-up demand as something like Xbox 360, youre going to have challenges about making sure you supply demand.
Were working very hard to ensure that we supply product to all the territories. We do think that its more important to enter the market, particularly at the holiday season, in all the territories and if that means were going to have a little bit of challenge in making sure that we continue to supply product, well manage that.
One thing Id like to point out is that there is an important process difference between us and how Sony and Nintendo do this, and I think you saw this with the PSP launch. When Sony and Nintendo traditionally launch, they pick a certain number of units X thousands of units and then they put it in the marketplace, and then they dont ship anything for six weeks. The retailers dont know when the next shipment is even coming!
Our process is actually quite different when were talking with retailers, what we will say is, this is your day one quantity, this is how many units youre going to get week one, how many units youre going to get week two, how many units youre going to get week three, week four
It goes on and on. Our process is to continually supply the channel.
What that does for the retailers is it gives them predictability. They can continue to advertise because they know they have new product coming up. It gives consumers some predictability because they can keep coming back to the store, and it gives people who do pre-sales some predictability because even if they dont have enough product for day one, they can say, hey, I can take a reservation for day 27, and the person can know theyre going to get the product at that point.
So we are trying to work through changing the way that the industry thinks about this. The historical philosophy is sort of to launch and leave the marketplace; we just think thats a bad approach.
Sure, it means you have a great day one sales figure, but down the line, nobodys going to remember that anyway. The things people are going to remember about Xbox 360 are, wow, they had a great launch line-up, they got off to a great start and they put a ton of pressure on Sony and Nintendo early on in the cycle, and that helped them to be successful.
Thats the type of stuff people are going to recall and which actually will make a difference and frankly, going back to the question about the simultaneous European launch, thats part of the process. We want to get off to a great start in every marketplace, and we want to get out of the blocks early enough.
What kind of lead would you like to have on your rivals by the time they enter the marketplace?
The easy answer is as much as I can, and I dont mean that to be snotty the reason its hard to be specific is that Sony has been incredibly vague about what theyre doing thus far. Theyve said that theyre going to launch in the spring someplace
That makes it a little hard for me to say, hey, this is the kind of lead we want to build!
Instead, really what I say is, whenever they launch, Im ready. They should just tell me which market, what date, and Im happy to be there and well already be in that market, it turns out. So were going to try to build volume as fast as we can
What kind of targets do you have in that area?
We havent been specific about volume numbers yet. We probably at some point as part of our financial disclosure process will make some forecasts on the future, but for right now, were really just focused on spending as much time as we can showing as much game opportunity as we can. We think thats the place to come from.
Again, does anybody remember how many units we had day one in the last generation? No. I had to send somebody off to find out! Its just not the most important issue.
How many games are you going to have from the outset?
The game thing is a great question. Right now we think that our launch portfolio is looking like its about 15 titles, plus or minus a few. We arent being really specific yet we probably will be in about two or three weeks, and in the next 48 hours or so were probably going to post a list and say these are the candidates for launch but the games still have to go through certification, so I dont want to promise a list of titles today when the games havent been certified yet.
So its a little tricky to be precise, but weve already heard that Electronic Arts thinks theyre going to have five titles, Activision thinks theyre going to have four titles, we think were going to have three titles
So you add up the number, and you start to get to the point where 15 starts to feel like whats going to happen. The specifics will shake out as titles go through certification thats a sort of natural process.
Then, as Ive said before, we have over 200 titles in development, most of which will ship over the course of 2006 some of those will ship in 2007.
How many of those 200 titles are going to be exclusive to Xbox 360?
Well, it depends on when they ship. Everything we ship right now is next-generation exclusive, and so part of that depends on when theyre going to ship. Certainly, all the first party stuff which youve seen Mass Effect, Too Human, Gears of War, and obviously the three launch titles, Kameo, Perfect Dark Zero and PGR3, the things were doing in Japan
Those are all going to be exclusive.
Weve also announced some titles where were very specifically exclusive Call of Duty is very specifically exclusive, DOA is exclusive to us, Oblivion is exclusive. Saints Row is exclusive, Condemned is exclusive, Full Auto is exclusive
Theres a pretty rich set of titles, at least to the window we can see out to in the future. Well see as we move forward into the latter half of 2006.
Exclusive titles are what drives a platform, theyre the reason people buy platforms, but last generation there was a feeling that Xbox did very well out of cross-platform games, because it was the most powerful system so they looked best on Xbox. In this generation, Sony claims PS3 to be more powerful, you claim that its equally powerful so best case, youre about the same. Are you concerned that this will lose you the cross-platform advantage you had before?
No, basically for a variety of different reasons. The first is that I think the reality will be that a game on Xbox 360 and a game on PS3, thats cross-platform, the power that theyre going to get from the PS3 and the power that theyre going to get from the Xbox 360 are going to be about the same. Right? You know, weve done the math. We have silicon engineers too. Weve done the math on their specs and our specs and we think theyre about the same. So thats one thing.
More fundamentally, a really cool trend for us is that people are doing their next-generation content on Xbox 360. Now, they may end up porting some of that to PS3, but Xbox 360 is becoming the reference platform for them to work with, because we have development kits. We have real tools that they can actually do real work on. So what thats going to mean is that the games end up being optimised for the platform theyre created for. Thats going to lead to some great content.
The third thing Id point out is, Sony doesnt have the equivalent of Xbox Live, so cross-platform games dont support Xbox Live. There may end up being some online thing from Sony, but Sony doesnt have the service, they dont have the single user identification, they dont have all the things weve shown on Xbox Live. So if you want to play online, which title are you going to buy?
I think its all of those factors, which have actually helped us this generation, as well as next-gen. I think were going to do great with cross-platform product.
Source: GameIndustry.biz