Interviews// Xbox's J Allard at X05

Can we talk about the launch line-up, because it's still kind of ambiguous what games you're going to launch with the console?

J Allard: The ones that are done! The ones that are done!

Can I press you on that? Can you say which ones?

J Allard: You can press all you want, but no games are through certification yet, so it's hard to say precisely. What I can say is the first party team is wound up and they're going to try to get as many of the titles that they're hoping for on day one, but we’re not going to sacrifice quality!

What are you hoping for?

J Allard: We're hoping for all three of the first party titles to be there on day one. We're hoping, though. We're not going to sacrifice quality to do it. I mean you saw that with Halo; everyone was disappointed with the press. We moved the Halo 2 date out to November, and people said 'ah, I expected it in April, this is a travesty, it's disastrous!' No, it's the best game that's ever been created, and we were glad that we waited and didn't rush it out. We're going to take the same approach with the first party content. If something's not ready, we'll hold it back.

Are you saying these three key titles might not be ready for launch?

J Allard: Well, you can never promise something that's not done. Until they pass through certification, I won't say, Shane won't say, Robbie won't say, Peter won't say. When it's done, we'll say it's done. The original Xbox, PlayStation, Dreamcast, pick your game console, what game console maker said two full months before launch 'this is definitively what you're going to get on day one' and was right?

We didn't have those lists, I think it's a higher bar and an impractical bar to set right now. We've shown people what we're aiming for in 2005, [and] what we're aiming for in 2006. The teams have the final dev kits, we're starting to pass stuff through certification now. I think we're going to have a great holiday, no matter how you look at it.

Does that keep you up at night, the fact that you know you can't guarantee these three key titles, and other key titles from other publishers might not be there for launch?

J Allard: No, not at all. I think we've got a great portfolio and some great, deep games. Having played most of the games we showed last night hands-on. I've finished Kameo, I feel great about Kameo, I've played Call of Duty for dozens of hours now, I've played Perfect Dark quite a bit, I've played PGR.

I know where these games are, I mean these games are not far from being done, and if they're three weeks after the launch, or they're on launch day, I don't think it makes a significant difference. We'll have, on day one, adequate content to show that the next generation has started out. I don’t think that there's a gamer in the world that has a day one console experience that says there aren't two or three games here I can buy. And by the time they're through with those two or three games, there's going to be the one that might not have made it on the store shelf. These games are all very close. Just go play them and test for yourself.

Would you risk putting a game out that was almost finished?

J Allard: It's up to the publishers, you know, it's happened before. I think that Shane [Kim] would tell you his attitude of first party is that we don't want to risk it. You take an anticipated title like Kameo, and that's a very unique title in our portfolio, let's make sure we get it right. I think of all the first party titles, that's the one that's probably closest in the bag. But we want to get it right. If you take something like Perfect Dark Zero and say it's a franchise or take Gotham Racing and say it's a franchise. There are other racing games that are coming out at that time in that time window. We can't afford to get it wrong. Let's not get it wrong, let's do it right. We're doing some breakthrough stuff in Gotham like the Gotham TV work, like the track editor, that we want to set the tone for the third parties in terms of 'hey, look what direction might work moving forward in games', so I think we're going to be patient there, but the teams are killing themselves to get there. Everyone wants to be there on day one. The content teams are all so motivated, they all want to be there on day one, they want to be there on the very first day that the consumer walks in and shells out their hard earned Euros or pounds and purchase the content. They want to be right there as part of that launch line-up.

[b]So far we haven’t seen any real genre busters for 360. You’ve got the racing game, the FPS game, the fighting game… Obviously it’s early days, but are you confident that you’ll eventually get those must-have titles?[/b]

Allard: I think that, in many ways in what we’ve done with 360 creating great development tools is we’re gonna attract more developers trying bigger and broader ideas. The difficulty and the focus with launch is that people want to do conventional things at launch and they want to hit all the conventional categories, they want to make sure their franchise properties are out there.

But there is some great stuff! There’s a guy who finished Kameo and played through Kameo, and I haven’t played a game like Kameo. The closest thing to it is Zelda, but in Zelda, you just play one character with one gameplay mechanic [has Allard been playing the same Zeldas we have?] throughout the entire game. Kameo has very diverse gameplay mechanics. I believe I’ve played a lot of games in my day and I’ve never played a game that’s just like Kameo, so I don’t know if you call it a genre buster, or what category it’s in… I don’t know what your personal opinion is of how successful it will be, but that’s gonna be right there on launch.

How long will it be before the games portfolio really does start living up to the promise of power we get from the 360?

Allard: Well that’s up to the game creators. It’s hard to say. I think the line-up on arcade, where we can reduce the cost of development where you don’t have to manufacture discs or have a ten million dollar budget etc, etc…

Anybody can make a Live Arcade game. If Steve Boxer has a crazy, nutty idea and three friends in a garage, that wanna do something genre busting, breakout, that’s gonna broaden the audience, Steve Boxer should give me a call and you can do that with $100,000. You can go and invent a new breakout kinda game. We didn’t talk much about it last night, but we do have an arcade station set up with 15-20 games, somewhere in the neighbourhood, for this holiday on Live Arcade.

And every month, more will be coming out, and I think it’s gonna be a combination of prices. We don’t set the prices, the publishers of the content set their own prices, but in general, we’re saying $10-20, which seems to be the natural price point where the casual market is on the PC. We’ve also talked to publishers and without naming names or titles, we’ll have free content on Live Arcade that will be sponsored. Brought to you by ‘Sponsor X’. You download the content, there’s a sponsor screen or some little in-game placement, and you play the game for free.

You’ll certainly see some experimentation on live arcade to some extent; in two years from now, we’re all playing Live free games, that all have some kind of advertising model like television does. I don’t know.