Chris Satchell
Chris Satchell: It turns out the control input on Zune is absolutely brilliant for games. That's what – I couldn't do it because I was just showing movies here today – but that's what people get when they play Zune. When they play XNA games on Zune, the thing that hits them is just how good the control scheme is. For cell phones you use the four buttons or whatever, and you play this with a touch pad and it's like 'this plays really well'. I think that's kind of fun.
SPOnG: So, is there a plan to roll out community games to the Zune in the future?
Chris Satchell: Maybe. We haven't got firm plans at the moment, but what we're trying to see first is, do we get a lot of interest from the development community? Because that's where it starts. So, if we see lots of interest from the development community- and we've already seen signs of that – that's when you start to move on and say, 'OK, is there a good way to distribute this, and can we use the pipeline we've already got?'
But the first step for us is, let's focus on getting the development environment out, and if we see a lot of creativity, that's a good indicator for us. It's exactly what we did on Xbox 360.
SPOnG: How's the launch window looking?
Chris Satchell: We're targeting end of the year, so probably around November.
SPOnG: What do you think to Nintendo's strategy with WiiWare? Initially there was talk of independent developers, then you see companies like Square Enix with titles in the launch line-up. What do you think to the strategy?
Chris Satchell: I've been a little confused by WiiWare... The more I look at it, the more I'm confused, because it's sort of doesn't really look like almost something for independents. At best it's what we would call a registered developer programme. It's really a way for you to get hold of dev kits and the normal development environment when you're not signed to a big publisher. Which is very different than what we're doing with XNA, which is you can just go and download the tools and we're gonna give you a distribution (platform) and the community will manage it, we're going to completely enable you, versus 'well, if you kind of work with us we can possibly kind of, back door or grandfather you into some kind of developer programme which is a lot like our professional developer programme'.
So, I'm not actually convinced it's really going to empower the community a whole bunch. I think probably they do want to enable independent developers. I don't know how much they're succeeding with that, and I don't know if it's going to be the sea change that I'm hoping we'll see with XNA of really empowering the community.
SPOnG: Speaking of empowering the community, you've made XNA free to students independently of their universities. What's the uptake been like?
Chris Satchell: We're partnering with over 700 universities at the moment around the world. We're using XNA Game Studio to teach in their courses. The uptake's been pretty incredible. You think we've... we'll have done that for two years this December and already we're at that kind of scale. It's not a silver bullet, but it's a really great tool to empower academia, and that's what happens. We give the (tool) side and they bring the great courses and great teaching. When you put it together you get something really magical for students where they really want to learn, they get excited about gaming and computer science. We've seen it take off.