http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=55585

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Microsoft set to offer XNA technology to consumer electronics rivals
by Kristan Reed  

When Microsoft announced XNA back at GDC, you could hear a collective
groan from the assembled hacks as the stark realisation clanged like a
thousand lead balloons that the Xbox 2 wasn't going to be revealed
after all. What did we get instead? XNA. XNA? More like WTF.

But, as it turns out, the Redmond-based behemoth was up to its world
domination plans once again, and more than a little coy with its
vision, as an interview with J Allard last week proved conclusively.

Far from being the suspected re-marketing and re-branding of the
DirectX set of middleware tools for PC, Mobile and Xbox, Microsoft has
explicit plans to leverage these tools into a something far more
ambitious than a mere games console that retails for £299 at launch
and plays occasionally cool next gen titles. It wants to create the
entire standard of gaming across every platform. Scratch that. It
wants to own the entire standard of gaming across every platform. This
isn't about warring between incompatible standards, it's about
creating a standard - a VHS-standard of ubiquity. Don't think 3DO,
think DVD. This is, after all, one of the biggest companies in the
entire world, and it wants your money.

Microsoft is essentially bored with the current obsession surrounding
console cycles, and the obsolescence that happens every five years. It
likes the way the film industry does things - the way that grand old
business manages to seamlessly project movies into every conceivable
corner of the market, from the box office to the handheld and every
point in between. It wants gaming to follow the lead of the movies,
and coin in the bucks that having invisible standards brings. The
consumer doesn't care about the technology when they watch a film, and
Microsoft wants the same to apply to videogaming. Hence its point
blank refusal to talk about Xbox 2 to date. It wants to talk about the
software. It's all about XNA, and only now is the industry waking up
to its colossally ambitious plans. It doesn't want to foist you to buy
one incompatible device, but it does want gamers to enjoy a gaming
'universe' across a multitude of devices - all complying to the XNA
standard, natch. And would it be happy for those devices to be made by
companies other than itself.

As Allard points out, gaming is the only major form of electronic
entertainment that doesn't offer consumers choice. The 3DO model of
providing a reference console design and allowing rival manufacturers
to make their own was, he asserts, "ahead of its time". Of course,
there would still be a Microsoft version of its console, but the
company wants others to join in. Panasonic, Toshiba, JVC, Sharp? Maybe
even Sony? Stranger things have happened.

But it's even bigger than just talking about XNA powered next gen
consoles. Clearly Microsoft has designs on just about every niche you
could squeeze this into. Handhelds, desktop PCs, laptop PCs, airport
terminals, mobile phones, PDAs, the list goes on. It really does hurt
the brain to think about how far reaching this whole plan is - it's
essentially its Windows equivalent for games. An OS for gaming, if you
will.

Can it succeed? Usually Microsoft cocks things up at least a couple of
times in amusing fashion before it eventually works out a better way
of doing things, and it'd be beyond foolish to imagine that the
company will steal a march on its rivals just yet.

As even Allard himself confesses, "I think it would be very hard to
tap into the next gen, but you can start sneaking up on it". And
that's exactly what it'll do. Sneak like Sam Fisher through the
shadows of gaming and stealthily snatch pieces of the market until it
has it by the neck where it wants it.

But it won't be easy. Certainly, the power of the PlayStation brand is
a major stumbling block for Microsoft, as is Nintendo's dogged
innovation and loyal following. No one said any of this would be a
stroll - but at least it's thinking of a different way of doing things
rather than just following the thoroughly predictable model of making
a more powerful machine. The differentiators just aren't there anymore
- the generational leaps don't have the impact they once had.

Microsoft knows more than ever that the 5G consoles will be much of a
muchness for the end user, with similar power, similar graphics and
broadly similar games. It needs to think of a different tactic, and
XNA appears to be its Trojan Horse to the end user and the elusive
mass market that everyone talks about, but very few ever get anywhere
near - at least not in the way that the movie industry does every
single day. Even the mighty GTA, The Sims and Half-Life play out to
puny audiences compared to the top-rated forms of mass entertainment,
whatever the masters of spin conjure with their impressive financial
reports, which only serve to remind us how bloody expensive games
really are.

The way Allard tells it, this is all about the masses. A vision that
follows the film industry's example and leverages XNA to become the
gaming equivalent of DVD. He's brimming with excitement about the
possibilities of inter-compatible gaming universes 'projected' onto
all manner of XNA-compatible gaming devices both big and small. Halo
everywhere, more or less. It's a big aim, but one you have a hunch
that Microsoft could pull off, given time. This motion towards a
de-facto standard for gaming is "inevitable for the industry," Allard
says, as confidently as ever. "Is that a 30-year inevitability or a
three-year inevitability? It's probably closer to the latter," he
asserts. Time will tell, but somewhere between the two extremes seems
like a fair guess.

The full transcript...
Eurogamer: How important is wireless networking for the future of the
Xbox?

J Allard: It's huge - it's one of the centre points of Xbox. Our
long-term vision is that Xbox Live is a gaming world that ultimately
projects on multiple devices, right? Today we project on Xbox,
obviously. You can also get Xbox Live via the web.

Eurogamer: Can you imagine doing a handheld version of the Xbox and
them being connected over wireless?

J Allard: I think that strategy is flawed. I think the right strategy
for online long term is that you don't even think about building the
packaged disk, right? You think about building this gaming universe.
Let's rethink Halo for a second. Let's not think about Halo the way we
think about it - let's step back and think about Halo the world - this
is actually how the Bungie guys think about it.

Let's think about Halo the conflict, let's think about Halo the
characters. Let's think about Halo the rules. Okay, from there, let's
go [and] project that universe to as many screens as we can, right?
Those screens might be cell phones, and the cell phone world, what are
you doing in the Halo universe? Well, maybe you're bartering for
things. Maybe you're repairing a Warthog, maybe you're doing things
that are appropriate for that device that don't happen in Halo today.
Maybe you're checking on how your clan is doing - maybe those types of
things.

Eurogamer: Are you talking multiple genres?

J Allard: Yeah, all blended in. Now I'm on the PC, now I'm on the web.
Maybe I'm managing my clan schedule and our practice tournament and
our challenges and we have a little blog that we keep for the team,
and maybe I do that on the PC - and that's a PC implementation. Maybe
there's an RTS-like view on top of Halo.

Eurogamer: Would you consider releasing these different versions of
Halo as standalone products?

J Allard: I think it's always a jacket of the same [Halo] universe.
You're in an airport kiosk, and you don't have 3D acceleration; how do
you participate there? And then you go home to the 5.1 surround system
with the big plasma screen, how do you participate there? Well, it
might be different depending on whether you're an Xbox 1 customer or
an Xbox 2 customer.

When you can rethink Halo, and actually if you talk to the Halo guys,
if you talk to any guys that are nominated for game of the year, they
start with the universe, they add the conflict, they add the
characters, they add the rules and then they bundle it all up in an
experience that's appropriate for one device generally, or multiple
devices in the same environment? I think that's really going to change
- I think [game developers] are going to think about building these
game worlds and projecting them out, and that's the vision of both
Live and XNA, to be able to project that out and make it less about
the hardware, because if you make it about the hardware the challenge
you run is that now the consumer has no choice.

Imagine a cell phone solution which said you could only use one cell
phone with this one network carrier - it would never fly! There's such
a diversity of devices; Cell Phones, DVD players, car radios, laptops,
PCs. Name a hardware industry - television sets, microwave ovens -
just keep going. Name one 100 per cent penetration consumer
electronics device technology that doesn't offer choice - videogames.
It's the only one. It's insane.

I think, and you asked the question earlier, 'would Microsoft get in
the handheld space?' I want to get in the handheld space in the
following way; I want to be able to go and project our partners'
visions of the future of games on as many devices as possible. I don't
want to go try and make a device and hold up the handheld and say this
is the thing you're going to want to put in your pocket. This is the
thing you're going to want to spend $300 on.

Eurogamer: Is this part of your whole XNA 'It's about the software'
mantra?

J Allard: Yeah, well because the world is about the software. DVD
movies are about the software - it doesn't matter about the hardware.
You make hardware choices and say 'this is my bundle of features'.
Service is software, and when you make a cell phone choice, it's not
about the hardware, maybe the form factor wins in or whatever, but you
do a lot of text messaging so you get a Blackberry one, or you want a
camera or you wanted this or you wanted that, and it's fundamentally
about the service and making sure that that all works. But it's the
software that enables all the features that you want, and you pick the
right thing and choice is really important to you, and we've got to
drive more choice, and I think that rather than trying to drive huge
growth of a single device in one category - a handheld I just think is
a losing proposition.

Eurogamer: Do you see Xbox, then, as a kind of VHS or DVD style
standard for gaming in the future?

J Allard: I think that's very much how the XNA thing could play out.
In many ways 3DO was an idea ahead of its time where Trip [Hawkin]
said 'what we'll do is do a design reference and everyone will build
their own implementation'.

Eurogamer: Would you ever go down that road?

J Allard: Well, I think it was an idea ahead of its time. I think it's
inevitable for the industry. Is that a 30-year inevitability or a
three year inevitability? It's probably closer to the latter, because
the dynamics of our industry are you sell it and you lose money or you
break even. You create this enormous brand awareness, right? There
isn't an enormous brand awareness around DVD. Nobody created a 'this
is what DVD does for you' like they do for PlayStation, like they do
for Xbox, so it's going to be hard to break that model, but I think if
you want 100 per cent of the homes in the world to go and adopt this
as a form of new genre entertainment, it's inevitable because people's
preferences are going to drive requirements into the ecosystem that we
currently cannot satisfy.

Eurogamer: But this requires other hardware manufacturers to make
consoles compatible with your technology...

J Allard: Well, it requires that, but it also requires you to start
building enough software distraction that the creators aren't focused
on the hardware limitations because they're focused on the software.
This is what happened in the PC space if you dial back a hundred years
ago, in the PC space, the operating systems were customised to the
hardware, the applications were customised to the operating systems,
it was a complete mess, prices were incredibly high, adoption was
incredibly low, innovation was incredibly low, and it just wasn't a
very efficient market.

Boom! Then comes along DOS, you got one hardware implementation - the
IBM PC - that drove a lot of adoption, a lot of applications dropped
on top of that, we had the software layer in the middle that buffered
you from the hardware and then different manufacturers could come in
and compete with IBM, and you had the multitude of hardware devices, a
multitude of applications, and the network effect that was created was
more and more and more applications, more and more and more
innovation, more and more and more hardware, lower and lower price
points, more and more adoption, more and more money in the overall eco
system. Damn that was healthy.

Right now in this market, we're doing it all! Y'know, we're trying to
do it all. And for inefficient it's much more like Beta and VHS, and
when Beta and VHS had that battle going on the format battle, the
adoption of video recorders was very low, the price points were very
high, the price points for movies were very high, rentals were very
inaccessible, and as soon as the de facto standard of VHS emerged,
everybody started manufacturing, not only the recorders, the tapes,
and the film industry got behind it -POOM! Everybody needed one! And
that's where we need to get to with games, so I think it's an
inevitability.

Eurogamer: It's not going to happen in the next gen, though is it?

J Allard: I think it would be very hard to tap into the next gen, but
you can start sneaking up on it. A great example was the Panasonic Q,
right? I mean, Nintendo kind of tried to do that. They said 'look,
consumers want choice - one of the choices that they're going to want
is movie playback, well, our target, our sweet spot of our market,
it's not important, so it's for this higher end thing. We'll partner
with Panasonic and let them do the one that plays movies'. Then that
failed for a number of different reasons. 3DO failed for a lot more
reasons than the notion.

There are a lot of hard problems you've got to solve, and I think
Nintendo failed to solve all the problems, as did 3DO, but I think our
industry has to solve them if we want games to be right next to
movies. If you want games to be right next to movies you've got to
learn a few things about movies, and that is not everybody invents
their own camera before they make a movie.

And that is, you go and project that movie, not just on the big
screen, but on the DVD, for rental, for purchase, you project it on
the television over HBO, and then you do it for pay-per-view, and you
do it on aeroplanes, and you figure out how to go and project that
vision everywhere you can, and capitalise on [that] so you can afford
the investment in making these epics. Right now we're not doing that
in gaming either.

I looked at the film industry, and that was a perfect [analogy], a
reference point to learn from, and there are a hundred companies
making DVD players and the films project onto so many different
screens. There are so many different ways. You probably have all
enjoyed Spider-Man -we probably all enjoyed it in a very different
way, and that's great, because all of that that worked for the
industry, and allowed them to spend that much money to make that movie
that good, right, and we're not quite there in games. We're stuck.

Eurogamer: Do you believe in the concept of integrating game consoles
into home entertainment devices in the same way that Sony seems to be
doing at the moment?

J Allard: I think we believe in it, but I think we have a very
different view on what the right way to do it is. When I think about
home media, Sony talks about the PlayStation as the hub of the home.
The first thing we've learned about Xbox in this dimension is that the
average number of rooms in Xbox visits is about 1.85, meaning that a
kid will bring it down to the big screen TV when his dad's on a
business trip for a week, or bring it over to their mum's house for
the weekend or his friend's house for a sleepover, so the console
moves. If the console moves, is that where the family wants to store
their memories? Y'know, their music libraries, their photos, their
videos? No!

What happens is on the PC with personal media, it's where you want to
store it, it's where you want to manage it, it's where you want to
manipulate it - in some cases you make it, and a lot of cases you move
it; you burn a CD or you put it on a portable device. The PC is the
centre for how you manage media now at home, so what we want to do is
project it over to Xbox. We think of Xbox more as the amplifier of
those experiences for your TV set, for your bedroom or wherever your
Xbox is. We want to be able to receive that media for the players
where it makes sense to store that media, which is the PC.

The first step was Music Mixer, where you could go and import your
music from the PC, so you could take your PC-based soundtracks and
then try to recreate them on your Xbox, you re-rip them, and this year
we're going to do a Media Centre extender kit, which basically remotes
home movies, recorded television, your music collection and everything
else for media centre-based PCs which is this step in the direction.
Our strategy is very sound: the PC is going to be the hub of all that
media because you want to move it, you want to manage it and
manipulate it, and the best place to do that is the PC. I don't want
to edit movies on my TV in my living room, and neither do other people
- they're content with that entertainment device. I want to watch
them, but I don't want to edit them and burn them.

Eurogamer: What's your reaction to the PSP?

J Allard: The PSP? It's big. It's a little bit bigger than I thought
it [would be]. Last year I forecast that it would be twice the size of
an iPod, and it's 2.8 times the size of an iPod - that's a big device.
Volumetrically it's about 2.8 times the size, power consumption is a
bit high; the rotating mass media is a real challenge for battery
life, so I would worry about [that]. The screen is beautiful, the
analogue stick is beautiful, the industrial design is beautiful. I
don't know what the market is for it; I struggle with [the] market for
it because I think it will be an expensive product I think that UMD is
going to have a very difficult adoption - they haven't talked much
about the plan, but I think there's a real challenge in adopting that
format, much like Minidisc years ago. You go get the studios and you
go get the record labels to go support that format.

For me, I want to be able to play my movie, y'know, I wanna have one
copy of The Matrix, I don't need four copies on different sizes, and
part of the proposition for the movies is to watch the first part of
it at home, and watch the second half on the train, and how do you do
that? Well, maybe they have a strategy where they're going to have
home players that play UMD, and maybe that will be very successful,
but I think that's important.

Similarly with music, I think that it's very hard to think about
changing that format, because I want it in my car, right? And I also
want it on my portable device, so if anything I think the next
transition from music is not from the five inch CD to a smaller CD,
but from five inch to a hard drive, right? And so I think it's a real
challenge for music.

The games proposition, I think is exciting. I think the movie
proposition is hard because of the battery and because of the
orientation of [motions watching a PSP in front of his face]. Do that
for two hours -y'know that's kind of awkward. So, now do I have a
stand for it - doesn't that defuse some of the possibilities with it?
So that's a little tough, but the game proposition could be exciting
and the question - and I think they did the right thing by starting
it. By starting it though, who's the audience? 18 to 36 year-old males
- I don't know how much time they spend in an environment, just
culturally I just don't understand how much time they spend.

Smaller children, school buses, getting driven to soccer practice, all
of that, lots of places where I want to play Game Boy if I'm under 15.
If I'm over 15 I'm usually with friends, I'm usually doing something
very active, I'm usually driving... not driving so much. A lot of
people commute on trains and stuff like that so it'll probably be
ideal. It's going to be a big ticket item - it's a big device so it'll
be interesting to see where it goes. It's an exciting visually
stimulating product - the screen is beautiful, but I wonder about it
from a pocket point of view.

Eurogamer: What do you think of the Nintendo DS?

J Allard: The DS... is amazingly cool. When they said touch screen, I
got a shaky cam version of the press conference and they talked about
the touch screen, I was like 'Wow!' I get it, I didn't get it at all
leading up to that, but when they said it was a touch screen I was
like, not only can you have infinite UI now, where you don't have to
add more buttons but you've added more buttons, but now this... it
could be a fun gameplay mechanic, I think it might be gimmicky, but
what I really get excited about is the social part. Now I can write
notes to my friends, so if you think about text messaging for adults,
particularly in Europe and Japan and that phenomenon, and now imagine
it was school age kids with the wireless networking built into the
thing on the bus, on the train, in the classroom, being able to write
notes to each other and customise their characters it is perfect for
the demographic.

Eurogamer: What do you think of Infinium Labs' Phantom, and the
business model of giving the machine away in return for a two year
subscription commitment?

J Allard: Good work, yeah. The online gaming thing in general, we're
in our infancy. I think with Xbox Live we've learned an enormous
amount, we've demonstrated and I think that we've quelled a lot of the
scepticism whether people will pay for it, whether broadband was the
right choice, is voice an important feature, is Microsoft going to do
it, will games support it, can they get the subscribers, I think all
those questions are gone now, but if we re-rationalise with the
pricing structures, and whether that value is, and how you monetise
it... no it's kinda like early cable TV.

And so you talk about this two year subscription thing, that's kinda
like early cell phone, right, I mean my first cell phone was free and
I paid for a two-year subscription, and it was an $800 device that...

Eurogamer: ...you carried on your shoulder?

J Allard: Right! Exactly, it was a Motorola, it was an absolutely
ridiculous purchase in a lot of ways, but now I buy my cell phones and
I won't commit to service, and so the service evolves, and so the
Infinium thing, the Xbox Live thing, I think that Sony charging no
money is suicidal, because more and more of the value proposition of
the experience and the engagement for the gamer happens online, and so
all of the... y'know, if I go and buy an Xbox to only play Project
Gotham Racing and I play it for ten years - we made money out of that
customer. If you do that on Sony's model, they don't. So, that's a
hallucination, I mean, that's just a pathological case today.

Fast forward four or five years when every game is online and people
don't have the time, and the audience gets broader, so people aren't
engaging with lots of different properties, there's a real segment out
there which will buy three games. There is an untapped market of
people that will only buy three gaming experiences and play online
like crazy. Sony has got to figure out how to capitalise on those
guys. They can either make the games $200, or they can start charging
for the service. I think that's an inevitability.

I just think Halo 2 is going to tip our world upside down. I think
nobody will go to work on November 9th, I think there will be fights
in stores over the last copies, I think it will be one of the biggest
pre-orders in the history of mankind.

Eurogamer: How many limited edition units are going out?

J Allard: Not decided. One of the things we're doing now is collecting
retail orders now that they know the date, now that they've had hands
on. E3 is a reconnaissance mission. I bet on a million pre-orders.

Eurogamer: Do you expect a big increase in Xbox sales?

J Allard: I think we're going to do a bunch of things. We are going to
promote this thing like a movie. This is going to be like Sony
Pictures goes and promotes Spider-Man. We're thinking of this as a
very very important entertainment property, I think that will drive
awareness of Xbox. I think Xbox will become hot, even if I don't care
about Halo because of the way we're promoting it. I think it will also
drive people that have heard about Halo and now see this to drive them
to buy the console. Maybe the biggest impact is going to be to drive
people towards Live.

Eurogamer: The European Live take-up is nowhere as big as the US -
why?

J Allard: That's more infrastructure issues. We've had some
performance issues with a couple of the different providers and
provision strategies. We've had some stuff with hardware, we've had
some configuration stuff, so it's been a little bit harder, plus I
don't think we've had a killer app. I'm thrilled that we've got FIFA
on Live I think that's a killer app for Europe. I'd love to have
Formula One on Live. I wish somebody would do it and Bernie Ecclestone
would loosen his wallet a little bit so we could have that experience,
I think that would be enormous for gaming and enormous for Live.

Maybe there's a little bit of a language barrier. Maybe that. I think
we've done a great job to say 'hey, I'm a racing enthusiast, I want to
go race against other German speaking folks' - we've done a really
good job to do that, but people want to play with people that they can
relate to and there's a community start up issue. I think it's a
little bit more challenging.

Eurogamer: Couldn't you ever do a translation app?

J Allard: That'd be cool, huh? What would you translate it into?
Native language for everybody? That'd require software!

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whoa, Allard mentioned the Nintendo-Panasonic Q, I'm shocked!.