Ich stolpere oft über Xbox Artikel im Netz für die ich nicht dauernd einen neuen Thread aufmachen möchte. Daher habe ich mich entschlossen die Artikel hier reinzustellen. Also wer mehr wissen möchte was Microsoft zur Zeit so im Bereich Xbox so treibt, der sollte mal öfter hier vorbei schauen. 
Microsoft set to offer XNA technology to consumer electronics rivals
by Kristan Reed
Read on to hear what we thought of J Allard's recent surprisingly candid interview, and then either read the full transcript yourself, or download a movie of the interview direct from Eurofiles. For details on how to make use of our free file service, click here.
When Microsoft announced XNA back at GDC, you could hear a collective groan from the assembled hacks as the stark realisation clanged like a thousand lead balloons that the Xbox 2 wasn't going to be revealed after all. What did we get instead? XNA. XNA? More like WTF.
But, as it turns out, the Redmond-based behemoth was up to its world domination plans once again, and more than a little coy with its vision, as an interview with J Allard last week proved conclusively.
Far from being the suspected re-marketing and re-branding of the DirectX set of middleware tools for PC, Mobile and Xbox, Microsoft has explicit plans to leverage these tools into a something far more ambitious than a mere games console that retails for £299 at launch and plays occasionally cool next gen titles. It wants to create the entire standard of gaming across every platform. Scratch that. It wants to own the entire standard of gaming across every platform. This isn't about warring between incompatible standards, it's about creating a standard - a VHS-standard of ubiquity. Don't think 3DO, think DVD. This is, after all, one of the biggest companies in the entire world, and it wants your money.
Microsoft is essentially bored with the current obsession surrounding console cycles, and the obsolescence that happens every five years. It likes the way the film industry does things - the way that grand old business manages to seamlessly project movies into every conceivable corner of the market, from the box office to the handheld and every point in between. It wants gaming to follow the lead of the movies, and coin in the bucks that having invisible standards brings. The consumer doesn't care about the technology when they watch a film, and Microsoft wants the same to apply to videogaming. Hence its point blank refusal to talk about Xbox 2 to date. It wants to talk about the software. It's all about XNA, and only now is the industry waking up to its colossally ambitious plans. It doesn't want to foist you to buy one incompatible device, but it does want gamers to enjoy a gaming 'universe' across a multitude of devices - all complying to the XNA standard, natch. And would it be happy for those devices to be made by companies other than itself.
As Allard points out, gaming is the only major form of electronic entertainment that doesn't offer consumers choice. The 3DO model of providing a reference console design and allowing rival manufacturers to make their own was, he asserts, "ahead of its time". Of course, there would still be a Microsoft version of its console, but the company wants others to join in. Panasonic, Toshiba, JVC, Sharp? Maybe even Sony? Stranger things have happened.
But it's even bigger than just talking about XNA powered next gen consoles. Clearly Microsoft has designs on just about every niche you could squeeze this into. Handhelds, desktop PCs, laptop PCs, airport terminals, mobile phones, PDAs, the list goes on. It really does hurt the brain to think about how far reaching this whole plan is - it's essentially its Windows equivalent for games. An OS for gaming, if you will.
Can it succeed? Usually Microsoft cocks things up at least a couple of times in amusing fashion before it eventually works out a better way of doing things, and it'd be beyond foolish to imagine that the company will steal a march on its rivals just yet.
As even Allard himself confesses, "I think it would be very hard to tap into the next gen, but you can start sneaking up on it". And that's exactly what it'll do. Sneak like Sam Fisher through the shadows of gaming and stealthily snatch pieces of the market until it has it by the neck where it wants it.
But it won't be easy. Certainly, the power of the PlayStation brand is a major stumbling block for Microsoft, as is Nintendo's dogged innovation and loyal following. No one said any of this would be a stroll - but at least it's thinking of a different way of doing things rather than just following the thoroughly predictable model of making a more powerful machine. The differentiators just aren't there anymore - the generational leaps don't have the impact they once had.
Microsoft knows more than ever that the 5G consoles will be much of a muchness for the end user, with similar power, similar graphics and broadly similar games. It needs to think of a different tactic, and XNA appears to be its Trojan Horse to the end user and the elusive mass market that everyone talks about, but very few ever get anywhere near - at least not in the way that the movie industry does every single day. Even the mighty GTA, The Sims and Half-Life play out to puny audiences compared to the top-rated forms of mass entertainment, whatever the masters of spin conjure with their impressive financial reports, which only serve to remind us how bloody expensive games really are.
The way Allard tells it, this is all about the masses. A vision that follows the film industry's example and leverages XNA to become the gaming equivalent of DVD. He's brimming with excitement about the possibilities of inter-compatible gaming universes 'projected' onto all manner of XNA-compatible gaming devices both big and small. Halo everywhere, more or less. It's a big aim, but one you have a hunch that Microsoft could pull off, given time. This motion towards a de-facto standard for gaming is "inevitable for the industry," Allard says, as confidently as ever. "Is that a 30-year inevitability or a three-year inevitability? It's probably closer to the latter," he asserts. Time will tell, but somewhere between the two extremes seems like a fair guess.
The full transcript...
Eurogamer: How important is wireless networking for the future of the Xbox?
J Allard: It's huge - it's one of the centre points of Xbox. Our long-term vision is that Xbox Live is a gaming world that ultimately projects on multiple devices, right? Today we project on Xbox, obviously. You can also get Xbox Live via the web.
Eurogamer: Can you imagine doing a handheld version of the Xbox and them being connected over wireless?
J Allard: I think that strategy is flawed. I think the right strategy for online long term is that you don't even think about building the packaged disk, right? You think about building this gaming universe. Let's rethink Halo for a second. Let's not think about Halo the way we think about it - let's step back and think about Halo the world - this is actually how the Bungie guys think about it.
Let's think about Halo the conflict, let's think about Halo the characters. Let's think about Halo the rules. Okay, from there, let's go [and] project that universe to as many screens as we can, right? Those screens might be cell phones, and the cell phone world, what are you doing in the Halo universe? Well, maybe you're bartering for things. Maybe you're repairing a Warthog, maybe you're doing things that are appropriate for that device that don't happen in Halo today. Maybe you're checking on how your clan is doing - maybe those types of things.
Eurogamer: Are you talking multiple genres?
J Allard: Yeah, all blended in. Now I'm on the PC, now I'm on the web. Maybe I'm managing my clan schedule and our practice tournament and our challenges and we have a little blog that we keep for the team, and maybe I do that on the PC - and that's a PC implementation. Maybe there's an RTS-like view on top of Halo.
Eurogamer: Would you consider releasing these different versions of Halo as standalone products?
J Allard: I think it's always a jacket of the same [Halo] universe. You're in an airport kiosk, and you don't have 3D acceleration; how do you participate there? And then you go home to the 5.1 surround system with the big plasma screen, how do you participate there? Well, it might be different depending on whether you're an Xbox 1 customer or an Xbox 2 customer.
When you can rethink Halo, and actually if you talk to the Halo guys, if you talk to any guys that are nominated for game of the year, they start with the universe, they add the conflict, they add the characters, they add the rules and then they bundle it all up in an experience that's appropriate for one device generally, or multiple devices in the same environment? I think that's really going to change - I think [game developers] are going to think about building these game worlds and projecting them out, and that's the vision of both Live and XNA, to be able to project that out and make it less about the hardware, because if you make it about the hardware the challenge you run is that now the consumer has no choice.
Imagine a cell phone solution which said you could only use one cell phone with this one network carrier - it would never fly! There's such a diversity of devices; Cell Phones, DVD players, car radios, laptops, PCs. Name a hardware industry - television sets, microwave ovens - just keep going. Name one 100 per cent penetration consumer electronics device technology that doesn't offer choice - videogames. It's the only one. It's insane.
I think, and you asked the question earlier, 'would Microsoft get in the handheld space?' I want to get in the handheld space in the following way; I want to be able to go and project our partners' visions of the future of games on as many devices as possible. I don't want to go try and make a device and hold up the handheld and say this is the thing you're going to want to put in your pocket. This is the thing you're going to want to spend $300 on.
Eurogamer: Is this part of your whole XNA 'It's about the software' mantra?
J Allard: Yeah, well because the world is about the software. DVD movies are about the software - it doesn't matter about the hardware. You make hardware choices and say 'this is my bundle of features'. Service is software, and when you make a cell phone choice, it's not about the hardware, maybe the form factor wins in or whatever, but you do a lot of text messaging so you get a Blackberry one, or you want a camera or you wanted this or you wanted that, and it's fundamentally about the service and making sure that that all works. But it's the software that enables all the features that you want, and you pick the right thing and choice is really important to you, and we've got to drive more choice, and I think that rather than trying to drive huge growth of a single device in one category - a handheld I just think is a losing proposition.
Eurogamer: Do you see Xbox, then, as a kind of VHS or DVD style standard for gaming in the future?
J Allard: I think that's very much how the XNA thing could play out. In many ways 3DO was an idea ahead of its time where Trip [Hawkin] said 'what we'll do is do a design reference and everyone will build their own implementation'.
Eurogamer: Would you ever go down that road?
J Allard: Well, I think it was an idea ahead of its time. I think it's inevitable for the industry. Is that a 30-year inevitability or a three year inevitability? It's probably closer to the latter, because the dynamics of our industry are you sell it and you lose money or you break even. You create this enormous brand awareness, right? There isn't an enormous brand awareness around DVD. Nobody created a 'this is what DVD does for you' like they do for PlayStation, like they do for Xbox, so it's going to be hard to break that model, but I think if you want 100 per cent of the homes in the world to go and adopt this as a form of new genre entertainment, it's inevitable because people's preferences are going to drive requirements into the ecosystem that we currently cannot satisfy.
Eurogamer: But this requires other hardware manufacturers to make consoles compatible with your technology...
J Allard: Well, it requires that, but it also requires you to start building enough software distraction that the creators aren't focused on the hardware limitations because they're focused on the software. This is what happened in the PC space if you dial back a hundred years ago, in the PC space, the operating systems were customised to the hardware, the applications were customised to the operating systems, it was a complete mess, prices were incredibly high, adoption was incredibly low, innovation was incredibly low, and it just wasn't a very efficient market.
Boom! Then comes along DOS, you got one hardware implementation - the IBM PC - that drove a lot of adoption, a lot of applications dropped on top of that, we had the software layer in the middle that buffered you from the hardware and then different manufacturers could come in and compete with IBM, and you had the multitude of hardware devices, a multitude of applications, and the network effect that was created was more and more and more applications, more and more and more innovation, more and more and more hardware, lower and lower price points, more and more adoption, more and more money in the overall eco system. Damn that was healthy.
Right now in this market, we're doing it all! Y'know, we're trying to do it all. And for inefficient it's much more like Beta and VHS, and when Beta and VHS had that battle going on the format battle, the adoption of video recorders was very low, the price points were very high, the price points for movies were very high, rentals were very inaccessible, and as soon as the de facto standard of VHS emerged, everybody started manufacturing, not only the recorders, the tapes, and the film industry got behind it -POOM! Everybody needed one! And that's where we need to get to with games, so I think it's an inevitability.
Eurogamer: It's not going to happen in the next gen, though is it?
J Allard: I think it would be very hard to tap into the next gen, but you can start sneaking up on it. A great example was the Panasonic Q, right? I mean, Nintendo kind of tried to do that. They said 'look, consumers want choice - one of the choices that they're going to want is movie playback, well, our target, our sweet spot of our market, it's not important, so it's for this higher end thing. We'll partner with Panasonic and let them do the one that plays movies'. Then that failed for a number of different reasons. 3DO failed for a lot more reasons than the notion.
There are a lot of hard problems you've got to solve, and I think Nintendo failed to solve all the problems, as did 3DO, but I think our industry has to solve them if we want games to be right next to movies. If you want games to be right next to movies you've got to learn a few things about movies, and that is not everybody invents their own camera before they make a movie.
And that is, you go and project that movie, not just on the big screen, but on the DVD, for rental, for purchase, you project it on the television over HBO, and then you do it for pay-per-view, and you do it on aeroplanes, and you figure out how to go and project that vision everywhere you can, and capitalise on [that] so you can afford the investment in making these epics. Right now we're not doing that in gaming either.
I looked at the film industry, and that was a perfect [analogy], a reference point to learn from, and there are a hundred companies making DVD players and the films project onto so many different screens. There are so many different ways. You probably have all enjoyed Spider-Man -we probably all enjoyed it in a very different way, and that's great, because all of that that worked for the industry, and allowed them to spend that much money to make that movie that good, right, and we're not quite there in games. We're stuck.
Eurogamer: Do you believe in the concept of integrating game consoles into home entertainment devices in the same way that Sony seems to be doing at the moment?
J Allard: I think we believe in it, but I think we have a very different view on what the right way to do it is. When I think about home media, Sony talks about the PlayStation as the hub of the home. The first thing we've learned about Xbox in this dimension is that the average number of rooms in Xbox visits is about 1.85, meaning that a kid will bring it down to the big screen TV when his dad's on a business trip for a week, or bring it over to their mum's house for the weekend or his friend's house for a sleepover, so the console moves. If the console moves, is that where the family wants to store their memories? Y'know, their music libraries, their photos, their videos? No!
What happens is on the PC with personal media, it's where you want to store it, it's where you want to manage it, it's where you want to manipulate it - in some cases you make it, and a lot of cases you move it; you burn a CD or you put it on a portable device. The PC is the centre for how you manage media now at home, so what we want to do is project it over to Xbox. We think of Xbox more as the amplifier of those experiences for your TV set, for your bedroom or wherever your Xbox is. We want to be able to receive that media for the players where it makes sense to store that media, which is the PC.
The first step was Music Mixer, where you could go and import your music from the PC, so you could take your PC-based soundtracks and then try to recreate them on your Xbox, you re-rip them, and this year we're going to do a Media Centre extender kit, which basically remotes home movies, recorded television, your music collection and everything else for media centre-based PCs which is this step in the direction. Our strategy is very sound: the PC is going to be the hub of all that media because you want to move it, you want to manage it and manipulate it, and the best place to do that is the PC. I don't want to edit movies on my TV in my living room, and neither do other people - they're content with that entertainment device. I want to watch them, but I don't want to edit them and burn them.
Eurogamer: What's your reaction to the PSP?
J Allard: The PSP? It's big. It's a little bit bigger than I thought it [would be]. Last year I forecast that it would be twice the size of an iPod, and it's 2.8 times the size of an iPod - that's a big device. Volumetrically it's about 2.8 times the size, power consumption is a bit high; the rotating mass media is a real challenge for battery life, so I would worry about [that]. The screen is beautiful, the analogue stick is beautiful, the industrial design is beautiful. I don't know what the market is for it; I struggle with [the] market for it because I think it will be an expensive product I think that UMD is going to have a very difficult adoption - they haven't talked much about the plan, but I think there's a real challenge in adopting that format, much like Minidisc years ago. You go get the studios and you go get the record labels to go support that format.
For me, I want to be able to play my movie, y'know, I wanna have one copy of The Matrix, I don't need four copies on different sizes, and part of the proposition for the movies is to watch the first part of it at home, and watch the second half on the train, and how do you do that? Well, maybe they have a strategy where they're going to have home players that play UMD, and maybe that will be very successful, but I think that's important.
Similarly with music, I think that it's very hard to think about changing that format, because I want it in my car, right? And I also want it on my portable device, so if anything I think the next transition from music is not from the five inch CD to a smaller CD, but from five inch to a hard drive, right? And so I think it's a real challenge for music.
The games proposition, I think is exciting. I think the movie proposition is hard because of the battery and because of the orientation of [motions watching a PSP in front of his face]. Do that for two hours -y'know that's kind of awkward. So, now do I have a stand for it - doesn't that defuse some of the possibilities with it? So that's a little tough, but the game proposition could be exciting and the question - and I think they did the right thing by starting it. By starting it though, who's the audience? 18 to 36 year-old males - I don't know how much time they spend in an environment, just culturally I just don't understand how much time they spend.
Smaller children, school buses, getting driven to soccer practice, all of that, lots of places where I want to play Game Boy if I'm under 15. If I'm over 15 I'm usually with friends, I'm usually doing something very active, I'm usually driving... not driving so much. A lot of people commute on trains and stuff like that so it'll probably be ideal. It's going to be a big ticket item - it's a big device so it'll be interesting to see where it goes. It's an exciting visually stimulating product - the screen is beautiful, but I wonder about it from a pocket point of view.
Eurogamer: What do you think of the Nintendo DS?
J Allard: The DS... is amazingly cool. When they said touch screen, I got a shaky cam version of the press conference and they talked about the touch screen, I was like 'Wow!' I get it, I didn't get it at all leading up to that, but when they said it was a touch screen I was like, not only can you have infinite UI now, where you don't have to add more buttons but you've added more buttons, but now this... it could be a fun gameplay mechanic, I think it might be gimmicky, but what I really get excited about is the social part. Now I can write notes to my friends, so if you think about text messaging for adults, particularly in Europe and Japan and that phenomenon, and now imagine it was school age kids with the wireless networking built into the thing on the bus, on the train, in the classroom, being able to write notes to each other and customise their characters it is perfect for the demographic.
Eurogamer: What do you think of Infinium Labs' Phantom, and the business model of giving the machine away in return for a two year subscription commitment?
J Allard: Good work, yeah. The online gaming thing in general, we're in our infancy. I think with Xbox Live we've learned an enormous amount, we've demonstrated and I think that we've quelled a lot of the scepticism whether people will pay for it, whether broadband was the right choice, is voice an important feature, is Microsoft going to do it, will games support it, can they get the subscribers, I think all those questions are gone now, but if we re-rationalise with the pricing structures, and whether that value is, and how you monetise it... no it's kinda like early cable TV.
And so you talk about this two year subscription thing, that's kinda like early cell phone, right, I mean my first cell phone was free and I paid for a two-year subscription, and it was an $800 device that...
Eurogamer: ...you carried on your shoulder?
J Allard: Right! Exactly, it was a Motorola, it was an absolutely ridiculous purchase in a lot of ways, but now I buy my cell phones and I won't commit to service, and so the service evolves, and so the Infinium thing, the Xbox Live thing, I think that Sony charging no money is suicidal, because more and more of the value proposition of the experience and the engagement for the gamer happens online, and so all of the... y'know, if I go and buy an Xbox to only play Project Gotham Racing and I play it for ten years - we made money out of that customer. If you do that on Sony's model, they don't. So, that's a hallucination, I mean, that's just a pathological case today.
Fast forward four or five years when every game is online and people don't have the time, and the audience gets broader, so people aren't engaging with lots of different properties, there's a real segment out there which will buy three games. There is an untapped market of people that will only buy three gaming experiences and play online like crazy. Sony has got to figure out how to capitalise on those guys. They can either make the games $200, or they can start charging for the service. I think that's an inevitability.
I just think Halo 2 is going to tip our world upside down. I think nobody will go to work on November 9th, I think there will be fights in stores over the last copies, I think it will be one of the biggest pre-orders in the history of mankind.
Eurogamer: How many limited edition units are going out?
J Allard: Not decided. One of the things we're doing now is collecting retail orders now that they know the date, now that they've had hands on. E3 is a reconnaissance mission. I bet on a million pre-orders.
Eurogamer: Do you expect a big increase in Xbox sales?
J Allard: I think we're going to do a bunch of things. We are going to promote this thing like a movie. This is going to be like Sony Pictures goes and promotes Spider-Man. We're thinking of this as a very very important entertainment property, I think that will drive awareness of Xbox. I think Xbox will become hot, even if I don't care about Halo because of the way we're promoting it. I think it will also drive people that have heard about Halo and now see this to drive them to buy the console. Maybe the biggest impact is going to be to drive people towards Live.
Eurogamer: The European Live take-up is nowhere as big as the US - why?
J Allard: That's more infrastructure issues. We've had some performance issues with a couple of the different providers and provision strategies. We've had some stuff with hardware, we've had some configuration stuff, so it's been a little bit harder, plus I don't think we've had a killer app. I'm thrilled that we've got FIFA on Live I think that's a killer app for Europe. I'd love to have Formula One on Live. I wish somebody would do it and Bernie Ecclestone would loosen his wallet a little bit so we could have that experience, I think that would be enormous for gaming and enormous for Live.
Maybe there's a little bit of a language barrier. Maybe that. I think we've done a great job to say 'hey, I'm a racing enthusiast, I want to go race against other German speaking folks' - we've done a really good job to do that, but people want to play with people that they can relate to and there's a community start up issue. I think it's a little bit more challenging.
Eurogamer: Couldn't you ever do a translation app?
J Allard: That'd be cool, huh? What would you translate it into? Native language for everybody? That'd require software!
http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=55585
Opinion: J Allard sets out Microsoft's battle lines
You can't really accuse J Allard of not thinking big enough.
After all - aside from occasional flights of fancy from soundbite-friendly Sony Computer Entertainment boss Ken Kutaragi, or from Lionhead's Peter Molyneux (himself a close friend of Allard's) - it's rare to find a senior figure in the games industry freely discussing a long-term view which sees games devices becoming as ubiquitous and varied as DVD players, as integral a part of our homes as televisions, and games themselves as pervasive in every facet of our lives as music or video.
Certainly, it's not a unique vision, but it's unusual for someone in Allard's position to talk about it in any detail. His forward-looking comments in his interview with us are fascinating; you might even call them visionary. They certainly count as "thinking big," and they provide strong indications of the scope of Microsoft's ambitions.
What you might legitimately accuse Allard of, however, is not thinking new. None of his ideas are actually innovative; although we haven't heard them coming from his mouth before, and they certainly fill in a lot of information about Microsoft's future strategy, they're not actually original ideas in themselves. More a collection of other games industry ideas, some surprisingly old, for which Allard believes that the right time is coming.
Tripping Up
The most interesting of Allard's pronouncements, arguably, is his vision of a future where consoles are manufactured to a standard set of baseline specifications by a wide range of hardware makers, offering consumers a choice of hardware with different designs, abilities and price points, all of which will play back the same games - in the same way that DVD players vary wildly in price, design and specification, but can all play back the same DVD software. This is all about choice, says Allard, and it's all about software.
It's not a new idea, and Allard would be the first to admit that. In fact, he willingly raises the spectre of Trip Hawkins' ill fated 3DO console, which was based on a similar idea, and the Panasonic Q, which integrated a GameCube with a high-end DVD player. Neither device performed very well; Allard believes that 3DO was ahead of its time, and that both plans had major flaws. Other good recent examples include the Nuon, which aimed to build game hardware into DVD players, and the Linux-based Indrema console, which never even got to the manufacturing stage.
Allard prefers to compare Microsoft's grand scheme in this regard to DVD players rather than to previous failed experiments within the games industry - but it's here that eyebrows start to be raised. The comparison between game devices and DVD players is an obvious one, but it's got some huge flaws which Allard doesn't address; and in some areas, he makes comments which are simply inaccurate.
For example, he raises the argument that there is no brand awareness for DVD, and claims that nobody attempted to build a "this is what DVD does for you" campaign in the way that Sony has pushed PlayStation or Microsoft has pushed Xbox. But in fact, the consortium of companies who created the DVD standard spent vast amounts on promoting the standard and creating brand awareness for it when it first emerged; although their marketing was quite different to the marketing drive for a games console, it was an enormous push nonetheless, and the overall spend was probably higher than Microsoft and Sony's marketing budgets for their current consoles combined.
DVD did not become the de facto standard for consumer video that it is today simply by default, or because it was technically superior to the existing standard. Someone needs to promote any standard like that heavily and consistently for it to gain acceptance - and doubly so if it has serious competition in the marketplace, a factor which Allard ignores but which is crucially important. Sony isn't simply going to go away.
Vive La Difference
The comparison with DVD falls down in another crucial area as well - and it's one which Allard touches upon briefly, but gives few answers to. DVD players are inexpensive devices; although adding features can yield a very expensive piece of technology, the core requirements for manufacturing one are components which cost very little - a matter of a few Euro. Game consoles, on the other hand, are expensive; they contain cutting edge technology which, at launch, would be expected to outstrip the performance of PCs costing vastly more money, and although more features can be added, if a console maker skimps in an attempt to cut costs, games will play poorly or, more likely, not at all.
The upshot of this is that game consoles are, at least for the early years of their lifespans, sold at a significant loss by their manufacturers. This is part of the drive to create a huge brand, and Allard is correct in that this did not happen with DVD; instead, the market priced DVD players for early adopters at first, and then reduced prices as component prices also fell. Allard seemingly believes that this can be done with game consoles also - but there are several questions which are raised by this approach, which the comparison with the movie industry does not answer.
Games consoles need to be cutting edge, it could be argued. Some believe that in future we will reach a point where it's no longer worthwhile adding additional power to videogame systems, and a standard for game devices can be agreed upon, but the simple fact of the matter is that even several generations hence, videogame consoles will not be able to recreate a significant amount of the detail of the real world. The law of diminishing returns on console power will apply, certainly, but not to the extent that it will make sense to drop the current console generation model for a very long time.
Allard, and others, would point to the film industry, which has maintained its current standard for many years. Films, the argument seems to go, continue to entertain and innovate but have no need for cutting edge hardware in the home or constant upgrade cycles. The games industry only needs these things, the argument goes, because it is immature and stuck to an immature way of thinking and doing business.
The problem which is overlooked by this argument is that there is a fundamental difference between games and films; games are an interactive medium. Film technology has, in fact, progressed massively in the past ten years - just look at the advances in computer generated imagery. Ask Pixar how many times they have upgraded their massive, powerful rendering computers in the past decade, and you'll find that they are working on a cycle a lot smaller than the console industry. However, because what they are creating is a static entertainment product, it can still be packaged onto a DVD disc - regardless of the power of system required to generate it - and played on a standard DVD player.
This is not the case with videogames. Videogames, by their very nature, require every advancement in technology to take place in the actual playback hardware. Upgrading the systems of the developers to allow them to create more and more intricate graphics, physics and audio is pointless, if the home consoles cannot supply the level of processing power required to allow the user to interact with those creations. This is the core difference between the videogame and movie markets, and it's one which renders the comparison with DVD players fundamentally flawed. The technology must be cutting edge, unlike DVD; it must be attractively priced for consumers; and therefore it must be subsidised for the early part of its life.
Action, Reaction
Of course, it's easy to see why Allard, and the rest of Microsoft, would be keen on a market model in which they simply created a reference design and let others take care of the actual manufacture of consoles. After all, the company has lost billions of dollars on the Xbox to date, largely because of the significant loss it takes on every hardware unit it sells; and it is seemingly coming around to the idea that it isn't a hardware company after all. It would prefer to design the specification, let others do the hard work of building and selling the systems, and then rake in profit from the software sales. However, third party hardware manufacturers won't sell hardware at a loss. The change required to the business model of the games industry to accommodate this would be huge - and may indeed be entirely unfeasible, as outlined above.
Allard's strong belief in the "3DO model" is a reaction to the company's experience with Xbox; unsurprising, since Microsoft throughout its history has been a company which has reacted rather than leading the way, for the most part. Equally, his game plan for XNA - that contentious acronym which has gathered a surprising number of detractors and defenders for what is essentially just a marketing buzzword - is not innovative, but it's certainly highly reactionary.
XNA is presented by Allard as a technology which will allow games to operate across a wide range of devices; a basic genome which will link a whole menagerie of gaming devices and experiences. When he talks about it, he sounds convincing; but when XNA is boiled down to its most basic, the whole thing appears less exciting - and potentially more interesting, in fact.
XNA is designed as a framework to make Xbox 2 more easy to develop for. It has applications beyond Xbox 2, of course, since Microsoft is also providing it for PC developers, but it's Xbox 2 that is the core of the matter here. The raison d'etre for XNA, in a nutshell, is that Xbox 2 is going to be incredibly tough to develop for; with a six-processor design which will require game developers to start worrying about multi-threading and other such concepts in their code, all ideas which are completely alien to the development process as it stands.
On one level, XNA will help slightly by providing standard, familiar DirectX style interfaces to programmers on Xbox 2, but that will make very little odds to the actual complexity of coding for the system. More importantly, it is likely that XNA will form a framework for a whole set of technologies - such as RenderWare, or Havok physics - which will be supplied in multi-threaded, or thread-safe, form to developers, allowing them to take advantage of the multi-CPU design of Xbox 2 more easily.
That's a good thing. It's quite a technical thing, and it's not quite as exciting as Allard's talk about being the core of a DVD style standard for gaming or any such, which is why XNA is much more of a marketing brand than an actual technology brand. Providing tools to make Xbox 2 development easier didn't need the XNA brand attached; convincing the industry, and to a degree consumers, that this is all about the software and that Xbox 2 is easy to develop for, is what the XNA marketing brand exists for.
Parting Shots
Allard's future vision is compelling, there's no doubt, but it's also highly idealised and parts of it are in desperate need of more detailed explanation; or perhaps of more detailed thought. The actual effect on Xbox 2 of his projections will be minimal, perhaps even none; it would seem that he is thinking more in terms of the following generation, or even beyond that.
It's also telling that Microsoft's gameplan now differs substantially from Sony's. Sony wants to own the market from end to end; it is happiest with a vision of a future where it owns the content creation platform (Cell workstations), the content delivery system (UMD and Blu-Ray discs), the content platform (PS3, PSX3, PSP) and much of the software market (Sony Pictures, Sony Music, SCE's publishing divisions). Microsoft wants to be a software company, providing a reference design and games.
There's probably only room for one of those models in the games industry. The coming decade of conflict between the two companies can almost certainly have only one winner - and with Allard's cards on the table, along with Sony president Nobuyuki Idei's, the battle lines are well and truly drawn.
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/content_page.php?section_name=pub&aid=3489
Xbox 2 Development Secrets Revealed
By: César A. Berardini - "Cesar"
May. 19th, 2004 05:42 pm
J Allard had the following words before introducing the latest XNA advancements at the Microsoft Pre-E3 press briefing held in Los Angeles last week: "Now, every time I talk, people ask me why I don't say a little bit more about hardware. It's always software, software, software, software. So tonight you guys win. Let's talk about hardware."
And to the disappointment of the crowd expecting Xbox 2 related information, the Saleen S7 featured in the second Crash demo made by Pseudo Interactive was unveiled. It is not that the XNA demos arent impressive, but it isnt exactly the Xbox 2 hardware specs everyone was anticipating. In this first interview, J Allard confirmed to Computer and Videogames (CVG) that although the Xbox 2 hardware is locked down, Microsoft has decided not to talk about next generation hardware this year.
Luckily, CVG caught J Allard the morning after the Microsoft briefing in an effusive moment, in which the Corporate Vice President and Chief XNA Architect revealed some information about the Xbox 2 development.
"There's some stuff that's just knocked my socks off," stated Allard. "The thing we're looking at in the next generation is just an unbelievable amount of raw computing power - the architecture will be much more specialized."
Showing his excitement, Allard continued: "Right now you have your audio chip and you graphics chip and your CPU, and you're constantly trying to figure out the balances. In the next generation we're going to have so much silicon, so much raw computing horsepower - developers are going to be able to use this in interesting and exciting ways."
By now it was too late for Allard to stop talking and he continued to reveal additional details to CVG: "I've seen demos of terrain and worlds, with no textures in them whatsoever and no geometry - it's just a program that's creating a scene for you," and then Allard had to explain what procedural synthesis is all about:
"Art is the highest cost component of game development, and so much of the art is really repetitive and really intensive, and then doesn't come out to be very realistic. You know, bricks in a wall - very repeated textures."
"Let's go write the brick program and run the brick program to make a room full of bricks, lose the art expense and gain a more realistic looking room, because now we can focus on having the bricks there in a really realistic way. I get really excited about that kind of stuff."
"There are a lot of new techniques," Allard continued. "Like what shaders have done for 3D, there are a lot of new next-generation techniques for procedural synthesis that's really going to change how game construction is done, but also what the environment looks like so it feels a lot less 'cookie cutter'."
Sounds cool, eh? Coincidently, the latest issue of MITs magazine, Technology Review, has an article on Microsoft Research Asias Beijing lab. A division launched late last year that works on the Xbox and Longhorn (next version of Windows) is the focus of the article with some juicy quotes from experts around the world:
"Microsoft Research is by far the biggest contributor to graphics in the corporate world. Its a powerhouse," says Paul Debevec, a graphics expert at the University of Southern Californias Institute for Creative Technologies. "The Beijing lab, in particular, has achieved some amazing results, he adds. Its not just, How can we make a better Xbox?"
Then the article continues: "But in fact, a better Xbox is ultimately part of the labs mission. Reminders that this is a business, not a researchers playground, are never far away. In an adjoining hallway, a large corner room has its windows plastered over with opaque sheets of paper. The sign on the locked door reads, Xbox: Confidential. Baining Guo, a former Intel researcher and now Microsoft Research Asias graphics research manager, isnt allowed to talk about whats going on inside. Some of our best people work in there, is all hell say."
Could this be the place where the latest developments in procedural synthesis are being conducted? Well have to wait a few months to find out the truth, but the excitement J Allard expresses while talking about next generation technology is easily contagious when you read information such as this.
http://news.teamxbox.com/xbox/5962/Xbox-2-Development-Secrets-Revealed
The World's Hottest Computer Lab
Microsofts six-year-old Beijing lab has already paid dividends in speech recognition, graphics, wireless multimediaand the training of future executives.
http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/huang0604.asp?p=0
Microsoft set to offer XNA technology to consumer electronics rivals
by Kristan Reed
Read on to hear what we thought of J Allard's recent surprisingly candid interview, and then either read the full transcript yourself, or download a movie of the interview direct from Eurofiles. For details on how to make use of our free file service, click here.
When Microsoft announced XNA back at GDC, you could hear a collective groan from the assembled hacks as the stark realisation clanged like a thousand lead balloons that the Xbox 2 wasn't going to be revealed after all. What did we get instead? XNA. XNA? More like WTF.
But, as it turns out, the Redmond-based behemoth was up to its world domination plans once again, and more than a little coy with its vision, as an interview with J Allard last week proved conclusively.
Far from being the suspected re-marketing and re-branding of the DirectX set of middleware tools for PC, Mobile and Xbox, Microsoft has explicit plans to leverage these tools into a something far more ambitious than a mere games console that retails for £299 at launch and plays occasionally cool next gen titles. It wants to create the entire standard of gaming across every platform. Scratch that. It wants to own the entire standard of gaming across every platform. This isn't about warring between incompatible standards, it's about creating a standard - a VHS-standard of ubiquity. Don't think 3DO, think DVD. This is, after all, one of the biggest companies in the entire world, and it wants your money.
Microsoft is essentially bored with the current obsession surrounding console cycles, and the obsolescence that happens every five years. It likes the way the film industry does things - the way that grand old business manages to seamlessly project movies into every conceivable corner of the market, from the box office to the handheld and every point in between. It wants gaming to follow the lead of the movies, and coin in the bucks that having invisible standards brings. The consumer doesn't care about the technology when they watch a film, and Microsoft wants the same to apply to videogaming. Hence its point blank refusal to talk about Xbox 2 to date. It wants to talk about the software. It's all about XNA, and only now is the industry waking up to its colossally ambitious plans. It doesn't want to foist you to buy one incompatible device, but it does want gamers to enjoy a gaming 'universe' across a multitude of devices - all complying to the XNA standard, natch. And would it be happy for those devices to be made by companies other than itself.
As Allard points out, gaming is the only major form of electronic entertainment that doesn't offer consumers choice. The 3DO model of providing a reference console design and allowing rival manufacturers to make their own was, he asserts, "ahead of its time". Of course, there would still be a Microsoft version of its console, but the company wants others to join in. Panasonic, Toshiba, JVC, Sharp? Maybe even Sony? Stranger things have happened.
But it's even bigger than just talking about XNA powered next gen consoles. Clearly Microsoft has designs on just about every niche you could squeeze this into. Handhelds, desktop PCs, laptop PCs, airport terminals, mobile phones, PDAs, the list goes on. It really does hurt the brain to think about how far reaching this whole plan is - it's essentially its Windows equivalent for games. An OS for gaming, if you will.
Can it succeed? Usually Microsoft cocks things up at least a couple of times in amusing fashion before it eventually works out a better way of doing things, and it'd be beyond foolish to imagine that the company will steal a march on its rivals just yet.
As even Allard himself confesses, "I think it would be very hard to tap into the next gen, but you can start sneaking up on it". And that's exactly what it'll do. Sneak like Sam Fisher through the shadows of gaming and stealthily snatch pieces of the market until it has it by the neck where it wants it.
But it won't be easy. Certainly, the power of the PlayStation brand is a major stumbling block for Microsoft, as is Nintendo's dogged innovation and loyal following. No one said any of this would be a stroll - but at least it's thinking of a different way of doing things rather than just following the thoroughly predictable model of making a more powerful machine. The differentiators just aren't there anymore - the generational leaps don't have the impact they once had.
Microsoft knows more than ever that the 5G consoles will be much of a muchness for the end user, with similar power, similar graphics and broadly similar games. It needs to think of a different tactic, and XNA appears to be its Trojan Horse to the end user and the elusive mass market that everyone talks about, but very few ever get anywhere near - at least not in the way that the movie industry does every single day. Even the mighty GTA, The Sims and Half-Life play out to puny audiences compared to the top-rated forms of mass entertainment, whatever the masters of spin conjure with their impressive financial reports, which only serve to remind us how bloody expensive games really are.
The way Allard tells it, this is all about the masses. A vision that follows the film industry's example and leverages XNA to become the gaming equivalent of DVD. He's brimming with excitement about the possibilities of inter-compatible gaming universes 'projected' onto all manner of XNA-compatible gaming devices both big and small. Halo everywhere, more or less. It's a big aim, but one you have a hunch that Microsoft could pull off, given time. This motion towards a de-facto standard for gaming is "inevitable for the industry," Allard says, as confidently as ever. "Is that a 30-year inevitability or a three-year inevitability? It's probably closer to the latter," he asserts. Time will tell, but somewhere between the two extremes seems like a fair guess.
The full transcript...
Eurogamer: How important is wireless networking for the future of the Xbox?
J Allard: It's huge - it's one of the centre points of Xbox. Our long-term vision is that Xbox Live is a gaming world that ultimately projects on multiple devices, right? Today we project on Xbox, obviously. You can also get Xbox Live via the web.
Eurogamer: Can you imagine doing a handheld version of the Xbox and them being connected over wireless?
J Allard: I think that strategy is flawed. I think the right strategy for online long term is that you don't even think about building the packaged disk, right? You think about building this gaming universe. Let's rethink Halo for a second. Let's not think about Halo the way we think about it - let's step back and think about Halo the world - this is actually how the Bungie guys think about it.
Let's think about Halo the conflict, let's think about Halo the characters. Let's think about Halo the rules. Okay, from there, let's go [and] project that universe to as many screens as we can, right? Those screens might be cell phones, and the cell phone world, what are you doing in the Halo universe? Well, maybe you're bartering for things. Maybe you're repairing a Warthog, maybe you're doing things that are appropriate for that device that don't happen in Halo today. Maybe you're checking on how your clan is doing - maybe those types of things.
Eurogamer: Are you talking multiple genres?
J Allard: Yeah, all blended in. Now I'm on the PC, now I'm on the web. Maybe I'm managing my clan schedule and our practice tournament and our challenges and we have a little blog that we keep for the team, and maybe I do that on the PC - and that's a PC implementation. Maybe there's an RTS-like view on top of Halo.
Eurogamer: Would you consider releasing these different versions of Halo as standalone products?
J Allard: I think it's always a jacket of the same [Halo] universe. You're in an airport kiosk, and you don't have 3D acceleration; how do you participate there? And then you go home to the 5.1 surround system with the big plasma screen, how do you participate there? Well, it might be different depending on whether you're an Xbox 1 customer or an Xbox 2 customer.
When you can rethink Halo, and actually if you talk to the Halo guys, if you talk to any guys that are nominated for game of the year, they start with the universe, they add the conflict, they add the characters, they add the rules and then they bundle it all up in an experience that's appropriate for one device generally, or multiple devices in the same environment? I think that's really going to change - I think [game developers] are going to think about building these game worlds and projecting them out, and that's the vision of both Live and XNA, to be able to project that out and make it less about the hardware, because if you make it about the hardware the challenge you run is that now the consumer has no choice.
Imagine a cell phone solution which said you could only use one cell phone with this one network carrier - it would never fly! There's such a diversity of devices; Cell Phones, DVD players, car radios, laptops, PCs. Name a hardware industry - television sets, microwave ovens - just keep going. Name one 100 per cent penetration consumer electronics device technology that doesn't offer choice - videogames. It's the only one. It's insane.
I think, and you asked the question earlier, 'would Microsoft get in the handheld space?' I want to get in the handheld space in the following way; I want to be able to go and project our partners' visions of the future of games on as many devices as possible. I don't want to go try and make a device and hold up the handheld and say this is the thing you're going to want to put in your pocket. This is the thing you're going to want to spend $300 on.
Eurogamer: Is this part of your whole XNA 'It's about the software' mantra?
J Allard: Yeah, well because the world is about the software. DVD movies are about the software - it doesn't matter about the hardware. You make hardware choices and say 'this is my bundle of features'. Service is software, and when you make a cell phone choice, it's not about the hardware, maybe the form factor wins in or whatever, but you do a lot of text messaging so you get a Blackberry one, or you want a camera or you wanted this or you wanted that, and it's fundamentally about the service and making sure that that all works. But it's the software that enables all the features that you want, and you pick the right thing and choice is really important to you, and we've got to drive more choice, and I think that rather than trying to drive huge growth of a single device in one category - a handheld I just think is a losing proposition.
Eurogamer: Do you see Xbox, then, as a kind of VHS or DVD style standard for gaming in the future?
J Allard: I think that's very much how the XNA thing could play out. In many ways 3DO was an idea ahead of its time where Trip [Hawkin] said 'what we'll do is do a design reference and everyone will build their own implementation'.
Eurogamer: Would you ever go down that road?
J Allard: Well, I think it was an idea ahead of its time. I think it's inevitable for the industry. Is that a 30-year inevitability or a three year inevitability? It's probably closer to the latter, because the dynamics of our industry are you sell it and you lose money or you break even. You create this enormous brand awareness, right? There isn't an enormous brand awareness around DVD. Nobody created a 'this is what DVD does for you' like they do for PlayStation, like they do for Xbox, so it's going to be hard to break that model, but I think if you want 100 per cent of the homes in the world to go and adopt this as a form of new genre entertainment, it's inevitable because people's preferences are going to drive requirements into the ecosystem that we currently cannot satisfy.
Eurogamer: But this requires other hardware manufacturers to make consoles compatible with your technology...
J Allard: Well, it requires that, but it also requires you to start building enough software distraction that the creators aren't focused on the hardware limitations because they're focused on the software. This is what happened in the PC space if you dial back a hundred years ago, in the PC space, the operating systems were customised to the hardware, the applications were customised to the operating systems, it was a complete mess, prices were incredibly high, adoption was incredibly low, innovation was incredibly low, and it just wasn't a very efficient market.
Boom! Then comes along DOS, you got one hardware implementation - the IBM PC - that drove a lot of adoption, a lot of applications dropped on top of that, we had the software layer in the middle that buffered you from the hardware and then different manufacturers could come in and compete with IBM, and you had the multitude of hardware devices, a multitude of applications, and the network effect that was created was more and more and more applications, more and more and more innovation, more and more and more hardware, lower and lower price points, more and more adoption, more and more money in the overall eco system. Damn that was healthy.
Right now in this market, we're doing it all! Y'know, we're trying to do it all. And for inefficient it's much more like Beta and VHS, and when Beta and VHS had that battle going on the format battle, the adoption of video recorders was very low, the price points were very high, the price points for movies were very high, rentals were very inaccessible, and as soon as the de facto standard of VHS emerged, everybody started manufacturing, not only the recorders, the tapes, and the film industry got behind it -POOM! Everybody needed one! And that's where we need to get to with games, so I think it's an inevitability.
Eurogamer: It's not going to happen in the next gen, though is it?
J Allard: I think it would be very hard to tap into the next gen, but you can start sneaking up on it. A great example was the Panasonic Q, right? I mean, Nintendo kind of tried to do that. They said 'look, consumers want choice - one of the choices that they're going to want is movie playback, well, our target, our sweet spot of our market, it's not important, so it's for this higher end thing. We'll partner with Panasonic and let them do the one that plays movies'. Then that failed for a number of different reasons. 3DO failed for a lot more reasons than the notion.
There are a lot of hard problems you've got to solve, and I think Nintendo failed to solve all the problems, as did 3DO, but I think our industry has to solve them if we want games to be right next to movies. If you want games to be right next to movies you've got to learn a few things about movies, and that is not everybody invents their own camera before they make a movie.
And that is, you go and project that movie, not just on the big screen, but on the DVD, for rental, for purchase, you project it on the television over HBO, and then you do it for pay-per-view, and you do it on aeroplanes, and you figure out how to go and project that vision everywhere you can, and capitalise on [that] so you can afford the investment in making these epics. Right now we're not doing that in gaming either.
I looked at the film industry, and that was a perfect [analogy], a reference point to learn from, and there are a hundred companies making DVD players and the films project onto so many different screens. There are so many different ways. You probably have all enjoyed Spider-Man -we probably all enjoyed it in a very different way, and that's great, because all of that that worked for the industry, and allowed them to spend that much money to make that movie that good, right, and we're not quite there in games. We're stuck.
Eurogamer: Do you believe in the concept of integrating game consoles into home entertainment devices in the same way that Sony seems to be doing at the moment?
J Allard: I think we believe in it, but I think we have a very different view on what the right way to do it is. When I think about home media, Sony talks about the PlayStation as the hub of the home. The first thing we've learned about Xbox in this dimension is that the average number of rooms in Xbox visits is about 1.85, meaning that a kid will bring it down to the big screen TV when his dad's on a business trip for a week, or bring it over to their mum's house for the weekend or his friend's house for a sleepover, so the console moves. If the console moves, is that where the family wants to store their memories? Y'know, their music libraries, their photos, their videos? No!
What happens is on the PC with personal media, it's where you want to store it, it's where you want to manage it, it's where you want to manipulate it - in some cases you make it, and a lot of cases you move it; you burn a CD or you put it on a portable device. The PC is the centre for how you manage media now at home, so what we want to do is project it over to Xbox. We think of Xbox more as the amplifier of those experiences for your TV set, for your bedroom or wherever your Xbox is. We want to be able to receive that media for the players where it makes sense to store that media, which is the PC.
The first step was Music Mixer, where you could go and import your music from the PC, so you could take your PC-based soundtracks and then try to recreate them on your Xbox, you re-rip them, and this year we're going to do a Media Centre extender kit, which basically remotes home movies, recorded television, your music collection and everything else for media centre-based PCs which is this step in the direction. Our strategy is very sound: the PC is going to be the hub of all that media because you want to move it, you want to manage it and manipulate it, and the best place to do that is the PC. I don't want to edit movies on my TV in my living room, and neither do other people - they're content with that entertainment device. I want to watch them, but I don't want to edit them and burn them.
Eurogamer: What's your reaction to the PSP?
J Allard: The PSP? It's big. It's a little bit bigger than I thought it [would be]. Last year I forecast that it would be twice the size of an iPod, and it's 2.8 times the size of an iPod - that's a big device. Volumetrically it's about 2.8 times the size, power consumption is a bit high; the rotating mass media is a real challenge for battery life, so I would worry about [that]. The screen is beautiful, the analogue stick is beautiful, the industrial design is beautiful. I don't know what the market is for it; I struggle with [the] market for it because I think it will be an expensive product I think that UMD is going to have a very difficult adoption - they haven't talked much about the plan, but I think there's a real challenge in adopting that format, much like Minidisc years ago. You go get the studios and you go get the record labels to go support that format.
For me, I want to be able to play my movie, y'know, I wanna have one copy of The Matrix, I don't need four copies on different sizes, and part of the proposition for the movies is to watch the first part of it at home, and watch the second half on the train, and how do you do that? Well, maybe they have a strategy where they're going to have home players that play UMD, and maybe that will be very successful, but I think that's important.
Similarly with music, I think that it's very hard to think about changing that format, because I want it in my car, right? And I also want it on my portable device, so if anything I think the next transition from music is not from the five inch CD to a smaller CD, but from five inch to a hard drive, right? And so I think it's a real challenge for music.
The games proposition, I think is exciting. I think the movie proposition is hard because of the battery and because of the orientation of [motions watching a PSP in front of his face]. Do that for two hours -y'know that's kind of awkward. So, now do I have a stand for it - doesn't that defuse some of the possibilities with it? So that's a little tough, but the game proposition could be exciting and the question - and I think they did the right thing by starting it. By starting it though, who's the audience? 18 to 36 year-old males - I don't know how much time they spend in an environment, just culturally I just don't understand how much time they spend.
Smaller children, school buses, getting driven to soccer practice, all of that, lots of places where I want to play Game Boy if I'm under 15. If I'm over 15 I'm usually with friends, I'm usually doing something very active, I'm usually driving... not driving so much. A lot of people commute on trains and stuff like that so it'll probably be ideal. It's going to be a big ticket item - it's a big device so it'll be interesting to see where it goes. It's an exciting visually stimulating product - the screen is beautiful, but I wonder about it from a pocket point of view.
Eurogamer: What do you think of the Nintendo DS?
J Allard: The DS... is amazingly cool. When they said touch screen, I got a shaky cam version of the press conference and they talked about the touch screen, I was like 'Wow!' I get it, I didn't get it at all leading up to that, but when they said it was a touch screen I was like, not only can you have infinite UI now, where you don't have to add more buttons but you've added more buttons, but now this... it could be a fun gameplay mechanic, I think it might be gimmicky, but what I really get excited about is the social part. Now I can write notes to my friends, so if you think about text messaging for adults, particularly in Europe and Japan and that phenomenon, and now imagine it was school age kids with the wireless networking built into the thing on the bus, on the train, in the classroom, being able to write notes to each other and customise their characters it is perfect for the demographic.
Eurogamer: What do you think of Infinium Labs' Phantom, and the business model of giving the machine away in return for a two year subscription commitment?
J Allard: Good work, yeah. The online gaming thing in general, we're in our infancy. I think with Xbox Live we've learned an enormous amount, we've demonstrated and I think that we've quelled a lot of the scepticism whether people will pay for it, whether broadband was the right choice, is voice an important feature, is Microsoft going to do it, will games support it, can they get the subscribers, I think all those questions are gone now, but if we re-rationalise with the pricing structures, and whether that value is, and how you monetise it... no it's kinda like early cable TV.
And so you talk about this two year subscription thing, that's kinda like early cell phone, right, I mean my first cell phone was free and I paid for a two-year subscription, and it was an $800 device that...
Eurogamer: ...you carried on your shoulder?
J Allard: Right! Exactly, it was a Motorola, it was an absolutely ridiculous purchase in a lot of ways, but now I buy my cell phones and I won't commit to service, and so the service evolves, and so the Infinium thing, the Xbox Live thing, I think that Sony charging no money is suicidal, because more and more of the value proposition of the experience and the engagement for the gamer happens online, and so all of the... y'know, if I go and buy an Xbox to only play Project Gotham Racing and I play it for ten years - we made money out of that customer. If you do that on Sony's model, they don't. So, that's a hallucination, I mean, that's just a pathological case today.
Fast forward four or five years when every game is online and people don't have the time, and the audience gets broader, so people aren't engaging with lots of different properties, there's a real segment out there which will buy three games. There is an untapped market of people that will only buy three gaming experiences and play online like crazy. Sony has got to figure out how to capitalise on those guys. They can either make the games $200, or they can start charging for the service. I think that's an inevitability.
I just think Halo 2 is going to tip our world upside down. I think nobody will go to work on November 9th, I think there will be fights in stores over the last copies, I think it will be one of the biggest pre-orders in the history of mankind.
Eurogamer: How many limited edition units are going out?
J Allard: Not decided. One of the things we're doing now is collecting retail orders now that they know the date, now that they've had hands on. E3 is a reconnaissance mission. I bet on a million pre-orders.
Eurogamer: Do you expect a big increase in Xbox sales?
J Allard: I think we're going to do a bunch of things. We are going to promote this thing like a movie. This is going to be like Sony Pictures goes and promotes Spider-Man. We're thinking of this as a very very important entertainment property, I think that will drive awareness of Xbox. I think Xbox will become hot, even if I don't care about Halo because of the way we're promoting it. I think it will also drive people that have heard about Halo and now see this to drive them to buy the console. Maybe the biggest impact is going to be to drive people towards Live.
Eurogamer: The European Live take-up is nowhere as big as the US - why?
J Allard: That's more infrastructure issues. We've had some performance issues with a couple of the different providers and provision strategies. We've had some stuff with hardware, we've had some configuration stuff, so it's been a little bit harder, plus I don't think we've had a killer app. I'm thrilled that we've got FIFA on Live I think that's a killer app for Europe. I'd love to have Formula One on Live. I wish somebody would do it and Bernie Ecclestone would loosen his wallet a little bit so we could have that experience, I think that would be enormous for gaming and enormous for Live.
Maybe there's a little bit of a language barrier. Maybe that. I think we've done a great job to say 'hey, I'm a racing enthusiast, I want to go race against other German speaking folks' - we've done a really good job to do that, but people want to play with people that they can relate to and there's a community start up issue. I think it's a little bit more challenging.
Eurogamer: Couldn't you ever do a translation app?
J Allard: That'd be cool, huh? What would you translate it into? Native language for everybody? That'd require software!
http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=55585
Opinion: J Allard sets out Microsoft's battle lines
You can't really accuse J Allard of not thinking big enough.
After all - aside from occasional flights of fancy from soundbite-friendly Sony Computer Entertainment boss Ken Kutaragi, or from Lionhead's Peter Molyneux (himself a close friend of Allard's) - it's rare to find a senior figure in the games industry freely discussing a long-term view which sees games devices becoming as ubiquitous and varied as DVD players, as integral a part of our homes as televisions, and games themselves as pervasive in every facet of our lives as music or video.
Certainly, it's not a unique vision, but it's unusual for someone in Allard's position to talk about it in any detail. His forward-looking comments in his interview with us are fascinating; you might even call them visionary. They certainly count as "thinking big," and they provide strong indications of the scope of Microsoft's ambitions.
What you might legitimately accuse Allard of, however, is not thinking new. None of his ideas are actually innovative; although we haven't heard them coming from his mouth before, and they certainly fill in a lot of information about Microsoft's future strategy, they're not actually original ideas in themselves. More a collection of other games industry ideas, some surprisingly old, for which Allard believes that the right time is coming.
Tripping Up
The most interesting of Allard's pronouncements, arguably, is his vision of a future where consoles are manufactured to a standard set of baseline specifications by a wide range of hardware makers, offering consumers a choice of hardware with different designs, abilities and price points, all of which will play back the same games - in the same way that DVD players vary wildly in price, design and specification, but can all play back the same DVD software. This is all about choice, says Allard, and it's all about software.
It's not a new idea, and Allard would be the first to admit that. In fact, he willingly raises the spectre of Trip Hawkins' ill fated 3DO console, which was based on a similar idea, and the Panasonic Q, which integrated a GameCube with a high-end DVD player. Neither device performed very well; Allard believes that 3DO was ahead of its time, and that both plans had major flaws. Other good recent examples include the Nuon, which aimed to build game hardware into DVD players, and the Linux-based Indrema console, which never even got to the manufacturing stage.
Allard prefers to compare Microsoft's grand scheme in this regard to DVD players rather than to previous failed experiments within the games industry - but it's here that eyebrows start to be raised. The comparison between game devices and DVD players is an obvious one, but it's got some huge flaws which Allard doesn't address; and in some areas, he makes comments which are simply inaccurate.
For example, he raises the argument that there is no brand awareness for DVD, and claims that nobody attempted to build a "this is what DVD does for you" campaign in the way that Sony has pushed PlayStation or Microsoft has pushed Xbox. But in fact, the consortium of companies who created the DVD standard spent vast amounts on promoting the standard and creating brand awareness for it when it first emerged; although their marketing was quite different to the marketing drive for a games console, it was an enormous push nonetheless, and the overall spend was probably higher than Microsoft and Sony's marketing budgets for their current consoles combined.
DVD did not become the de facto standard for consumer video that it is today simply by default, or because it was technically superior to the existing standard. Someone needs to promote any standard like that heavily and consistently for it to gain acceptance - and doubly so if it has serious competition in the marketplace, a factor which Allard ignores but which is crucially important. Sony isn't simply going to go away.
Vive La Difference
The comparison with DVD falls down in another crucial area as well - and it's one which Allard touches upon briefly, but gives few answers to. DVD players are inexpensive devices; although adding features can yield a very expensive piece of technology, the core requirements for manufacturing one are components which cost very little - a matter of a few Euro. Game consoles, on the other hand, are expensive; they contain cutting edge technology which, at launch, would be expected to outstrip the performance of PCs costing vastly more money, and although more features can be added, if a console maker skimps in an attempt to cut costs, games will play poorly or, more likely, not at all.
The upshot of this is that game consoles are, at least for the early years of their lifespans, sold at a significant loss by their manufacturers. This is part of the drive to create a huge brand, and Allard is correct in that this did not happen with DVD; instead, the market priced DVD players for early adopters at first, and then reduced prices as component prices also fell. Allard seemingly believes that this can be done with game consoles also - but there are several questions which are raised by this approach, which the comparison with the movie industry does not answer.
Games consoles need to be cutting edge, it could be argued. Some believe that in future we will reach a point where it's no longer worthwhile adding additional power to videogame systems, and a standard for game devices can be agreed upon, but the simple fact of the matter is that even several generations hence, videogame consoles will not be able to recreate a significant amount of the detail of the real world. The law of diminishing returns on console power will apply, certainly, but not to the extent that it will make sense to drop the current console generation model for a very long time.
Allard, and others, would point to the film industry, which has maintained its current standard for many years. Films, the argument seems to go, continue to entertain and innovate but have no need for cutting edge hardware in the home or constant upgrade cycles. The games industry only needs these things, the argument goes, because it is immature and stuck to an immature way of thinking and doing business.
The problem which is overlooked by this argument is that there is a fundamental difference between games and films; games are an interactive medium. Film technology has, in fact, progressed massively in the past ten years - just look at the advances in computer generated imagery. Ask Pixar how many times they have upgraded their massive, powerful rendering computers in the past decade, and you'll find that they are working on a cycle a lot smaller than the console industry. However, because what they are creating is a static entertainment product, it can still be packaged onto a DVD disc - regardless of the power of system required to generate it - and played on a standard DVD player.
This is not the case with videogames. Videogames, by their very nature, require every advancement in technology to take place in the actual playback hardware. Upgrading the systems of the developers to allow them to create more and more intricate graphics, physics and audio is pointless, if the home consoles cannot supply the level of processing power required to allow the user to interact with those creations. This is the core difference between the videogame and movie markets, and it's one which renders the comparison with DVD players fundamentally flawed. The technology must be cutting edge, unlike DVD; it must be attractively priced for consumers; and therefore it must be subsidised for the early part of its life.
Action, Reaction
Of course, it's easy to see why Allard, and the rest of Microsoft, would be keen on a market model in which they simply created a reference design and let others take care of the actual manufacture of consoles. After all, the company has lost billions of dollars on the Xbox to date, largely because of the significant loss it takes on every hardware unit it sells; and it is seemingly coming around to the idea that it isn't a hardware company after all. It would prefer to design the specification, let others do the hard work of building and selling the systems, and then rake in profit from the software sales. However, third party hardware manufacturers won't sell hardware at a loss. The change required to the business model of the games industry to accommodate this would be huge - and may indeed be entirely unfeasible, as outlined above.
Allard's strong belief in the "3DO model" is a reaction to the company's experience with Xbox; unsurprising, since Microsoft throughout its history has been a company which has reacted rather than leading the way, for the most part. Equally, his game plan for XNA - that contentious acronym which has gathered a surprising number of detractors and defenders for what is essentially just a marketing buzzword - is not innovative, but it's certainly highly reactionary.
XNA is presented by Allard as a technology which will allow games to operate across a wide range of devices; a basic genome which will link a whole menagerie of gaming devices and experiences. When he talks about it, he sounds convincing; but when XNA is boiled down to its most basic, the whole thing appears less exciting - and potentially more interesting, in fact.
XNA is designed as a framework to make Xbox 2 more easy to develop for. It has applications beyond Xbox 2, of course, since Microsoft is also providing it for PC developers, but it's Xbox 2 that is the core of the matter here. The raison d'etre for XNA, in a nutshell, is that Xbox 2 is going to be incredibly tough to develop for; with a six-processor design which will require game developers to start worrying about multi-threading and other such concepts in their code, all ideas which are completely alien to the development process as it stands.
On one level, XNA will help slightly by providing standard, familiar DirectX style interfaces to programmers on Xbox 2, but that will make very little odds to the actual complexity of coding for the system. More importantly, it is likely that XNA will form a framework for a whole set of technologies - such as RenderWare, or Havok physics - which will be supplied in multi-threaded, or thread-safe, form to developers, allowing them to take advantage of the multi-CPU design of Xbox 2 more easily.
That's a good thing. It's quite a technical thing, and it's not quite as exciting as Allard's talk about being the core of a DVD style standard for gaming or any such, which is why XNA is much more of a marketing brand than an actual technology brand. Providing tools to make Xbox 2 development easier didn't need the XNA brand attached; convincing the industry, and to a degree consumers, that this is all about the software and that Xbox 2 is easy to develop for, is what the XNA marketing brand exists for.
Parting Shots
Allard's future vision is compelling, there's no doubt, but it's also highly idealised and parts of it are in desperate need of more detailed explanation; or perhaps of more detailed thought. The actual effect on Xbox 2 of his projections will be minimal, perhaps even none; it would seem that he is thinking more in terms of the following generation, or even beyond that.
It's also telling that Microsoft's gameplan now differs substantially from Sony's. Sony wants to own the market from end to end; it is happiest with a vision of a future where it owns the content creation platform (Cell workstations), the content delivery system (UMD and Blu-Ray discs), the content platform (PS3, PSX3, PSP) and much of the software market (Sony Pictures, Sony Music, SCE's publishing divisions). Microsoft wants to be a software company, providing a reference design and games.
There's probably only room for one of those models in the games industry. The coming decade of conflict between the two companies can almost certainly have only one winner - and with Allard's cards on the table, along with Sony president Nobuyuki Idei's, the battle lines are well and truly drawn.
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/content_page.php?section_name=pub&aid=3489
Xbox 2 Development Secrets Revealed
By: César A. Berardini - "Cesar"
May. 19th, 2004 05:42 pm
J Allard had the following words before introducing the latest XNA advancements at the Microsoft Pre-E3 press briefing held in Los Angeles last week: "Now, every time I talk, people ask me why I don't say a little bit more about hardware. It's always software, software, software, software. So tonight you guys win. Let's talk about hardware."
And to the disappointment of the crowd expecting Xbox 2 related information, the Saleen S7 featured in the second Crash demo made by Pseudo Interactive was unveiled. It is not that the XNA demos arent impressive, but it isnt exactly the Xbox 2 hardware specs everyone was anticipating. In this first interview, J Allard confirmed to Computer and Videogames (CVG) that although the Xbox 2 hardware is locked down, Microsoft has decided not to talk about next generation hardware this year.
Luckily, CVG caught J Allard the morning after the Microsoft briefing in an effusive moment, in which the Corporate Vice President and Chief XNA Architect revealed some information about the Xbox 2 development.
"There's some stuff that's just knocked my socks off," stated Allard. "The thing we're looking at in the next generation is just an unbelievable amount of raw computing power - the architecture will be much more specialized."
Showing his excitement, Allard continued: "Right now you have your audio chip and you graphics chip and your CPU, and you're constantly trying to figure out the balances. In the next generation we're going to have so much silicon, so much raw computing horsepower - developers are going to be able to use this in interesting and exciting ways."
By now it was too late for Allard to stop talking and he continued to reveal additional details to CVG: "I've seen demos of terrain and worlds, with no textures in them whatsoever and no geometry - it's just a program that's creating a scene for you," and then Allard had to explain what procedural synthesis is all about:
"Art is the highest cost component of game development, and so much of the art is really repetitive and really intensive, and then doesn't come out to be very realistic. You know, bricks in a wall - very repeated textures."
"Let's go write the brick program and run the brick program to make a room full of bricks, lose the art expense and gain a more realistic looking room, because now we can focus on having the bricks there in a really realistic way. I get really excited about that kind of stuff."
"There are a lot of new techniques," Allard continued. "Like what shaders have done for 3D, there are a lot of new next-generation techniques for procedural synthesis that's really going to change how game construction is done, but also what the environment looks like so it feels a lot less 'cookie cutter'."
Sounds cool, eh? Coincidently, the latest issue of MITs magazine, Technology Review, has an article on Microsoft Research Asias Beijing lab. A division launched late last year that works on the Xbox and Longhorn (next version of Windows) is the focus of the article with some juicy quotes from experts around the world:
"Microsoft Research is by far the biggest contributor to graphics in the corporate world. Its a powerhouse," says Paul Debevec, a graphics expert at the University of Southern Californias Institute for Creative Technologies. "The Beijing lab, in particular, has achieved some amazing results, he adds. Its not just, How can we make a better Xbox?"
Then the article continues: "But in fact, a better Xbox is ultimately part of the labs mission. Reminders that this is a business, not a researchers playground, are never far away. In an adjoining hallway, a large corner room has its windows plastered over with opaque sheets of paper. The sign on the locked door reads, Xbox: Confidential. Baining Guo, a former Intel researcher and now Microsoft Research Asias graphics research manager, isnt allowed to talk about whats going on inside. Some of our best people work in there, is all hell say."
Could this be the place where the latest developments in procedural synthesis are being conducted? Well have to wait a few months to find out the truth, but the excitement J Allard expresses while talking about next generation technology is easily contagious when you read information such as this.
http://news.teamxbox.com/xbox/5962/Xbox-2-Development-Secrets-Revealed
The World's Hottest Computer Lab
Microsofts six-year-old Beijing lab has already paid dividends in speech recognition, graphics, wireless multimediaand the training of future executives.
http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/huang0604.asp?p=0
