Interviews// Xbox's J Allard at X05

We sat down with J Allard at X05 and asked him a few questions. Here’s the complete UK interview transcribed in full;

It'd be nice to see some retro titles on other systems, available on Live Arcade maybe?

J Allard: You know, some of that could happen as well. I think that most of the publishers focus is obviously on the hardcore out of the gate. It's nice that we're rounding it out and doing Arcade, we've got a great sports line-up, a great racing line-up as well. I think we've got a pretty well-rounded portfolio, but most of the publishers who are thinking about their investment in 360 are saying 'I want to establish that franchise with the hardcore that's going to serve me well'. I want the next Halo or the next Grand Theft Auto or the next Splinter Cell. I want to establish or breathe new life into a franchise, and they're focusing their A-teams towards the hardcore. I think next holiday is where you start hearing publishers say 'okay, there's an installed base, let's take some of that back catalogue maybe into Live Arcade.

[b]What about the (Xbox Live) Market Place stuff? Can you talk about that… it’s intriguing…[/b]

J Allard: It is intriguing. Y’know, it's going to be interesting to see how it plays out. All the publishers are very excited about the trailers and the demo opportunity, because they just want to get the content out, in a way, as I mentioned last night, being able to enjoy a trailer on whatever TV you're going to play the game on is a far different experience than downloading a little postage [stamp] sized video on your PC, and decided whether or not it's something that you want to experience, and obviously there's no substitute for a demo. So all the publishers are very excited about that.

When you get into some of the more personalised content or episodic content, I think that is an area where you're going to see different things from different publishers. You're going to see some experiments that work, some experiments that fail and some trepidation from publishers not really understanding how it fits into their business model with their development cycle.

So I think it's going to emerge, and so people say 'what's the business model? What are the prices going to be for a new level versus a new car, versus a tournament entry fee? What are they going to be giving away for free? What's going to be sponsored and free versus non-sponsored and paid?

It's kind of like the cell phone market, in a way, where the cell phones came out and we spent way too much money on the device, way too much money on the service, and three years later the device was free and the service had three tiers and the industry kind of sorted it out. Three years from now I think the marketplace will have a better, more precise view and way to think about it and to frame it. Right now we just want to build the infrastructure and sort of let a thousand flowers bloom and see what happens.

Is this very much a publisher-led thing, or is Microsoft Games Studios going to be doing experimental stuff as well?

J Allard: Yeah, it's just like the rest of the world in first party where we think we have to do Avant-Garde stuff that showcases the platform. We're the guys that can afford to be a little bit riskier with our content and with our dollars, and we have to pave the way.

So, as we did with Xbox Live - I think you remember we had that holiday with Xbox Live where I think we had seven or eight Live titles, and EA wasn't on Live yet, and other publishers were just starting to wade in. We had more Live games than anybody else, and the next holiday we had our share, and everybody else was on Live. I think you'll see the same kind of thing on market place where the Project Gotham Racing guys will have gamer tiles, even if nobody else wants to do gamer tiles online. As an experiment, Activision could look at it and say 'That's a good idea' or 'a bad idea', 'I'm going to follow' or 'I'm going to wait'.

What was the hardest part of getting to where you are now? The hardware or the software?

J Allard: It's not just rhetoric; every direct decision we make is hardware plus software and services. It's all combined, and so I think it's all a big part. The Live service, while it's up and running now, is not final. The hardware's final, the development kits are final, but the service is yet to be final, so that team is still cranking very hard.

To be very precise in answering your question, the most difficult part is actually the silicon, and it's not because the silicon is the most complex, which it is, but you want to take the most powerful silicon and the most advanced techniques in silicon that you can find, and put them into your box. And so, in terms of leading edge, the most leading edge work that we're doing is in silicon and that becomes your constraint.

People say 'you're not going to have enough units at launch - you're going to sell every one you can make, why don't you just make more?' Silicon is where we're up against the wall with physics and research and what we're capable of doing. We can make more plastic. We can get more memory. We can easily make more software and print more game disks, but the silicon thing is really the bugaboo. So at the heart of everything that we did, the silicon we really had to time very precisely for a 2005 launch, and it's where you can't screw up, and where you have a lot of money at stake.

I spoke to a couple of retailers yesterday and they were scared as they’ve heard nothing about allocation. How many units do you think there will be available for launch?

J Allard: We're not discussing numbers yet. I think no matter how big the number becomes, it still won't satisfy the demand. We're going to sell every one we can make. The allocation issue is a discussion; it's a dialogue with the retailers, and it's not just by territory, but it's also by country, and so at an event like this we can actually get some feedback from the retailers in terms of 'my country's going to be more ready when FIFA: Road to World Cup comes out, and that's going to be the killer app for my country', for example, so we can adjust our allocations.

We decided we're going to take a little bit of heat on allocations, frankly, in all the territories rather than take a lot of heat in one or two territories. So, we're not saying Europe comes twelve months later, we're saying Europe comes now, but with that, combining it with the physics properties of the silicon means we're going to have some disappointment in terms of what we can provide to retail and ultimately to the consumers this year, but that's okay, because we want to get the market started. We want to get started in a worldwide basis, we want to do the right thing for gamers, for our publishers and for consumers.

Has the launch proved harder than you originally imagined?

J Allard: No, we knew it was going to be really, really hard. It's a really hard problem, but, you know, we're stepping up. As Gerhard (Florin, EA Europe chief) said yesterday, it takes guts, but it's the right thing to do, and often the right thing to do takes guts. Will it go without a hitch? No. We’ll have some logistics issues, it's going to be difficult. We're buying a lot of capacity on planes and on boats and we're going to be co-ordinating a lot. Do I think it'll go flawlessly? I don't, but I think it's the right thing to do, and I think we'll look back on it, more convinced than ever that it was the right thing to do, and we're very committed to it.

It's a lot of late nights for a lot of people, and a lot of hard work, and we're going to get some heat. It's never fun to work really, really hard and then get heat from the media, from retailers, from the consumer because we didn't have enough of the things or because something wasn't quite as perfect as we’d like it to be in our execution, but the team signed up for it, because it's the right thing to do.

Are you worried that this is going to overshadow your message because the media's going to talk about lack of stock rather than the quality of gaming?

J Allard: You know what, I hope not. I hope that the enthusiasm for what we're doing on a worldwide basis and what the capabilities of the system itself are and the launch line-up we have. I think that's the overshadowing message. At the end of the day, [iPod] Nano screens scratch. Okay, tough, tough message. It's probably a tough message for the team at (California) and at Apple, but damn, that's a cool product. I think that while there's a hiccup in logistics and some slightly dissatisfied consumers at the end of the day, that's the coolest product you can buy in consumer electronics right now, and that overshadows everything. You guys can write about it as much as you want, but at the end of the day, I love the thing. Mine's scratched up, but it's fine, it's the coolest piece of kit that I own. That's what matters. I think our customers are going to look at 360 and say 'it's the coolest thing going'. I think we're going to take the mantle from Nano when we ship here in December, with a launch line-up that makes people say 'this is the coolest thing I can get. I'm disappointed I can't get it on day one, but I'll get it.' Or 'I'm disappointed I'm only sharing it over at my friend's house or that one title I was hoping for will ship two weeks later than I anticipated.