TANKs BLOG #42, Peter Moore x06 round table

Peter Moore sat down with game industry reports for a round table discussion at X06 which concludes today.

I've summarized the major parts of their discussions in this overview.

Peter confirms native 1080p support is built into the Xbox360 and it just needs a software update to 'turn it on'. He doesn't feel 1080p is important at the moment due to lack of true native 1080p sets in the market but feels it may become important during this console's lifecycle. So if the consumer makes the choice to buy a 1080p native set, the Xbox360 is ready to take advantage of that.

The HD-DVD rollout is staggered so Microsoft can meet demand. The reaction was positive over the HD-DVD player price point at X06. Microsoft will produce units as aggressively as consumer demand. If consumers don't care about HD-DVD, they won't produce as many. Spreading HD-DVD fandom isn't the goal of the Xbox360 or the HD-DVD player, it's just about choice. Microsoft's focus with the Xbox360 is still 100% on games. Peter Moore says there are no plans to release games on the HD-DVD format. Since the format war is not likely to be resolved over this console's lifecycle, there are no plans to produce an external BluRay device.

Peter Moore believes the 3rd party exclusives disappearing on PS3 is due mostly to business decisions. Publishers are in the business to make money and Microsoft will have an install base of 10 million units by the end of the year. So it's a solid business decision to choose Microsoft's Xbox360 right now.

Right now Microsoft doesn't see there being a conflict between Arcade and Retail games. They believe the games are completely different experiences and won't conflict with each other. Arcade games are restricted to 50mb which limits their complexity such that they shouldn't conflict with the full retail game experience. Arcade is also designed more for the casual and young gamer which are typically different people than those going out to buy Gears of War.

Lost Odyssey and Blue Dragon had huge demand at TGS with up to 3 hours of wait time to play the demo. Peter admits in the past that they've fallen short with bringing Japanese gamers what they want. With Xbox360 they are focused on bring Japanese style games to Japanese gamers and if those games do well in the west as well, that would be an added bonus. Demand in the west is also quite high for Lost Odyssey and Blue Dragon. Microsoft is starting to see progress in the Japanese market with their efforts and the Japanese market respects Microsoft's commitment to them.

Live Anywhere focus initially will be to bring the community aspect of Live on Xbox360 and bring that to the PC environment. It's not just about cross platform gaming, it's about bringing that Xbox360 community in as well. The service will evolve from there just like Live has evolved over the years. Peter says they're well aware of the technical challenges of bring Live to the PC and gaming PC vs Console as well as how quickly the PC market evolves vs the console market. He says some of the top minds at Microsoft are working on these technical challenges and they'll figure it all out. They definitely want a well balanced experience.

There are no plans for internet browsing on a the Xbox360. Peter believes the gaming experience is at a 10' range and browsing the web is more a 2' range experience. The experience is fairly poor but acknowledges that if the consumer really wants this, Microsoft is open to rethinking their position. No one's spent as much money as them so far on researching how to bring the web experience to the TV and there simply hasn't been much demand.

With that, the round table was concluded.