Xbox One: Microsoft's Mattrick and Spencer talk games, games, games

[Bald Bouncer]

The day before Xbox One's formal unveiling in Redmond, Microsoft's Aaron Greenberg described the announcement process as a two-part affair - the dedicated event, he explained in a podcast, would focus on the hardware itself and Microsoft's broad "vision for the future of games, the future of entertainment", with more to follow on individual releases at E3 a few weeks from now. In hindsight, that's a splitting of the material Microsoft probably should have made a bit more public. The decision to blow the lion's share of the event's slender one-hour runtime on live TV, Kinect features and somewhat ethereal talk of cloud computing has created the false impression that Xbox is no longer a platform for games enthusiasts, that Microsoft has "abandoned" the core Xbox audience in order to draw first blood in the forthcoming war with Google and Apple for dominance of the smart TV market.


There were games on offer, of course, including the latest Call of Duty and a formidable show of force from EA Sports, but only Remedy's mysterious Quantum Break was a genuine surprise, and there was no live gameplay. Even without the subsequent confusion over pre-owned on Xbox One, it was a troubled debut.



Thankfully, a glance at the bigger picture reveals that this is more a question of presentation than strategy. Microsoft will invest no less than $1 billion into games next gen - an unprecedented sum for the firm - and Xbox One will swipe 15 exclusive titles in its first year at retail, including eight new IPs. All that's on top of a two-year period of bulking up, which has seen Microsoft Studios open new games studios in London, Washington and Victoria, British Columbia while snapping up talent for its existing operations.

Core gaming powerhouses 343 Studios, Lionhead and Turn 10 have all seen significant appointments - Lionhead, for instance, now runs under the supervision of MMO expert John Needham, in further evidence that the rumoured Fable 4 will be a cloud-centric affair. Microsoft has hired former Sony executive Phil Harrison - the man who oversaw the gestation of such noted PlayStation IPs as LittleBigPlanet - to manage internal projects and developer relations in Europe. Rare Ltd is poised to return to one of its cherished franchises in what Microsoft Studios boss Phil Spencer bills a "historic" revival.

Black Tusk Studios is working on a mysterious action title that's designed to compete with Halo and Gears of War. Microsoft has opened Lift London to create and incubate smaller scale cloud-based games. New projects are underway at Microsoft Studios Osaka, reflecting IEB president Don Mattrick's assertion that the company remains "committed" to Japan. Perhaps most hearteningly, Microsoft has acquired Press Play and Twisted Pixel to work on "weird, unique" titles for Xbox Live. In short, there's a lot more bubbling away under the surface than the Xbox One event suggests.



Our own, pre-reveal chats with Mattrick and Spencer attest to this, though it's necessary to peel away a lot of glossy investor-speak about "delivery" and "excellence". "We want to be about serious fun," says Mattrick, summarising Xbox One's games and entertainment offering. "Things that people are really passionate about. Things that they love. Things that they can't wait to get home to experience and to use. That's what the Xbox brings about. So, we're in the serious fun side of the house. You can call us the, you know, five to nine section if you want."

Pushed to discuss Microsoft's attitude to first-party exclusives during a roundtable conversation with journalists, he offers a regrettably detail-free yet promising account of Xbox One's core release slate. "I think they're always important. We just ran through our script and counted the number of exclusives, and looked at the amount of money that we're spending and the deals that we have, exclusive windows and [things to create differentiation]. I think, candidly, people are way, way under-indexing how hard we're punching."

"We're going to come out with detail on things and people are going to go, 'oh my god'. Like, 'they were focused, they made this a core goal, core activity'. There are great hits, there's innovation, and there are world class creators plugged in. You know, I keep track of it all, and I hope everyone here does - we kind of look back at all the different years and at what we shipped, how many units have sold. There's a lot of hyperbole about things, but I think we're going to deliver."



According to Spencer, the key to Xbox One's appeal as a development platform is that it's built for flexibility. Where Xbox 360 was originally designed to cater to a fairly specific set of needs, Xbox One is built for a market that has expanded and fragmented, encompassing a dazzling variety of subgenres, business models and complimentary platforms.

"People are playing games on all kinds of devices, and games with different business models, with different engagement timeframes," he explains. "I think when we started Xbox 360 so many of the games were about 'I'm going to play it for four or five hours, and then I'm going to play online'.

"Today our creators are really lighting up with the opportunity to build games that can live as full screen immersive experiences like you're seeing on shelves today, but also the idea of building device experiences that live in the SmartGlass world that connect to what's on the screen. The ability to take your mobile away with you and continue to engage on it, engage with the game. The opportunities today - more people are playing games today than, I think, ever before."

Microsoft's dalliance with cross-platform entertainment has only served to remind it of gaming's importance. "When you look at all forms of content, across all devices, games always pop right to the top of the app stores that are out there - they're a form of content everybody loves." Xbox One is designed to enclose all of these experiences seamlessly, via beefed-up SmartGlass features for mobile software and a part-curated digital storefront that, Microsoft promises, will ensure prominence for lower-budget efforts without miring the dash in Xbox Live Indie-style mediocrity.

"If I want to play a game for two minutes, or I want to play a game for two hours, or I want to play a game with twenty other people," suggests Spencer, "all of those opportunities are available on the platform we're putting forward."



He's unable to share many details of what developers are creating for Xbox One, but he's happy to discuss the broad strokes. "I see our creators really taking that opportunity to think about their games in a more granular way. To still have the full immersive, quadruple-A experience on screen, but also think about how those experiences can roam with devices - and it's nice that our new box actually understands all this through the way it's structured, that people do multiple things at the same time, and I can have shorter gameplay sessions, longer game play sessions."

Spencer also notes that this is just the beginning - the platform's evolution will be driven as much by what people create for it as by Microsoft's own, planned refinements. "Just like at the beginning of any console generation, where we end up will migrate as people learn, as people learn about the functionality of the box. They'll learn as Live evolves, as our platform evolves.

"It's always fun for me to be there at the beginning of a console generation and then watch how things change. I mentioned earlier - if you look at the generation of games that are out there today versus the games that were available at the launch of Xenon, it's a generational leap on the same hardware, and I think you'll see that same evolution this time around."

Naturally, Mattrick's immensely heartened by the feedback on all this from third parties. "What I've heard other people say, without breaking any of their non-disclosure agreements, is that we've got something pretty good, and they're excited to work with us and to see what the capabilities are, and what it could mean for their business. As creators and particularly as consumers, people are like 'how do I get one early?'"

Talk is cheap, of course, and it'll take more than talk to reassure those underwhelmed by the shortage of new game announcements at Microsoft's event. But what we know of the company's on-going operations substantiates the rhetoric from executives, and leaves us hopeful that the second stage of the Xbox One publicity narrative will wipe away the apathy surrounding its "entertainment"-skewed reveal.

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