Chris Satchell
Chris Satchell: I actually haven't seen the numbers, so... I wish I had more to tell you there. I know they're working hard on the next release internally. So that's cool, to actually start bringing up the amount of functionality. But I haven't actually seen any subscription numbers.
SPOnG: OK. Again, with Windows Live, there was a lot made of cross-platform play between PC and Xbox Live, but it's not materialised in that many titles. Are we going to see more from that?
Chris Satchell: I think you will. I mean, we certainly support that with XNA Studios as well. It's what I was saying earlier – I think we talked about the idea of cross-device games from, say... I think it'd be Windows, Xbox, mobile, everything put together. We talked about it for a long time, and maybe it's a bit premature, but I do think over the next five years you will see more and more breakthrough games that bring all of it together.
SPOnG: To finish up, something a bit more long-range: do you have any ideas on how things will be in terms of the technology in 10 or even 15 years?
Chris Satchell: There are going to be some big trends. One of the biggest ones is the power of cell phones, that actually could be very meaningful for our industry. You look two years down and you see devices that are DX10 cell phones that can drive a high def display from a HDMI cable, dual core processors running at over a gigahert. That's in two years. That's a tonne of processing power. So you're really talking about something that, in a cell phone form factor, it's a low to mid-range laptop today.
When you've got that much processing power in your pocket I think there's a tonne of cool things you could do with gaming, from playing on the fly to connecting to a monitor, plugging in to your television or whatever. I think that's going to be one significant trend – about the complexity and scope of things that can be delivered on a cell phone and go with you anywhere.
I think with big consoles under the television, again, parallel processing is going to be part of the future, like we've seen with the current generation. I don't think that's going away. That's just where the silicon industry is and where they will continue to be, and I think it's going to be harder and harder to get those huge generational leaps in performance and graphics, because we've sort of started to come up to that flat part of the curve in terms of just how good graphics are and how much processing it takes to make the next step. Every time you go up, the curve gets flatter. It takes more and more power so that somebody can actually tell the difference.
So, I think what you'll see is people put a lot of effort into other things. It's always been very graphics-dominated, and people will still find new techniques, but I think AI and physics will really come to the fore. I saw Torsten (Reil) from Natural Motion setting up earlier – have you seen their technology, with the real reaction and the neural controllers that control the animation of characters on the fly, create new animation? - cool systems like that, that allows you to not only put someone that looks believable in the world, but they animate and react properly – I think that will be a big direction in technology.
And then online. New types of online genres and pervasive community will definitely be part of the technology future. You'll see bandwidth increasing and you'll see devices taking advantage of that.
SPOnG: Thank you for your time!