It’s been a year since Microsoft launched their next generation console in India. Now they are all set to release Halo 3 in India as well as launch the Xbox Live Service. So GameGuru.in (GG) decided to go and have a chat with Mohit Anand (MA), who is the Country Manager of the Entertainment and Devices Division at Microsoft India. He, along with Ashim Das Gupta (AG) and Shyam Sundar (SS), who are part of the team, spoke on a lot of things including BioShock, Halo 3 as well as the highs and lows of the Xbox 360 in India. Here is the whole interview:
GG: How is the Xbox 360 currently doing in India?
MA: Good question! As per your survey, all of us would be out of our jobs. Your survey says 1500-1600 units. If that were the units that we sold, I guess we’d all be out of our jobs. We don’t disclose figures on a nationwide or a region wide basis. All we can say is that worldwide were are now close to 16 million units sold, which is more than all of the other next-gen consoles that have been launched today. And I think that in India as well, we are not only the thought leader, but clearly the market leader and we are defining and creating this category in the country.
GG: How are the Xbox 360 games doing?
AG: As far as the games are concerned, we have got the highest attach ratios in the Asian countries and in fact one of the best and healthiest in the entire world. We are very happy the way the games are shaping up. With blockbuster games like Halo 3, PGR 4 and BioShock, all of them coming up, I think it is going to further consolidate.
MA: Just to add, and to give you context, when we launched and were about to launch we had always said that we would launch with 20 to 25 games and add 7 to 10 a month. And I go by that maths, we are talking of close to a 100 games by the year’s end or a little more. We are close to 70-odd already and this is really set to explode in the coming 4 months as you know the holiday season brings 40-50% of the portfolio and like Ashim said, the best blockbuster content is going to be available on the Xbox 360.
Here are the videos:
GG: Can we expect anything from the mobile arena from Microsoft?
MA: Well, on the mobile arena, from a games perspective, not a well know fact, but we actually have something already in the country. If you go to the Airtel mobile downloads that are currently on which they have partnered with Indiagames on, you will see Age of Empires II, which is our best-selling PC RTS game by Ensemble, which is a part of Microsoft Game Studios already available on the Internet. So what we have done actually is that we have partnered world wide with Infusio, who has moved on those rights to Indiagames for the Indian region. That’s it. We are not in the mobile space from a gaming perspective as of now and currently we have no announcements to make.
GG: Do we see Microsoft sponsoring any gaming clans or venturing into the gaming competition arena?
AG: We have had lot of such tournaments, lot of such initiatives that have been seen over the last few months. The most recent being the World Cyber Games, where we were the premier sponsor. It was a seven city event where the winner ultimately goes to Seattle to take part in the worldwide finals. So we have been doing these kinds of events off and on and we definitely would be doing such events going forward as well.
GG: Was Microsoft a tad bit apprehensive launching the Xbox 360 here in India, where the video game console market is not so big?
MA: Good question! Let me answer that with a counter question. With the amount of investments that we made in the category and the way we came out with all guns blazing, if that is “apprehensive”, then I don’t know what “aggressive” is. I think apprehensive that you would more aptly use in inverted commas with exclamation marks in caps for our competitor and I think we came out clearly with all guns blazing. We were very clear that whenever we would launch we would really make a long term commitment and all of as always say that we are in a marathon and have just run the first few kilometers and will continue to stay invested and do whatever is possible from our end to grow the category, blaze and create a path for the gaming industry to follow.
GG: Is Microsoft tying up with any Indian developers to make India-centric games?
MA: From India-centric games, my answer would be two-fold. First, it is about culturally relevant content. Culturally relevant content means the content that people in the local market enjoy and that does not essentially mean Indian games. Locally relevant content could mean playing a car racing game and having Mumbai as a map in it and then blowing a few autos and taxis and the nuisance of the traffic away, right. That’s fun. That’s culturally relevant content. We have made some big announcements there. We have Yuvraj Singh cricket game that’s been built for the World Cup. It’s actually the official game for the Twenty20 World Cup. We just announced less than ten days ago, for the first time in the world that we are going to bring educational content, which is CBSE and ICSE certified to the Xbox 360. So you can continue to expect more and more announcements on that in the future.
GG: Xbox 360 may be doing the best in India, however, if Wii launches here, what happens of it?
MA: Wii is a great concept! It’s added a new innovation and is a great product. Firstly, Nintendo has the longest heritage in gaming. They are a solid strong competitor and a company that has innovated in the games space and all credit to them for that product. Secondly, I think if they come here, I would welcome them sooner than later because I think we are in a market making task. We are creating the category. So more the merrier. Right now there is ample place for us to grow and create the business. We can worry about competing a few years down.
In fact, I was with the Sony GM a couple of days ago and we were chatting with exactly the same feelings. Let us create the market! Right now, we need to position gaming as a part of mainstream entertainment. We need to make it a part of popular youth culture. We need to break perceptions that some parents may have around the negative connotations of. We need to do all of that, we can compete a few years down. That said, how long will the Nintendo innovation have legs is something I think is the jury still out on. Because it is a great innovation, it got people off the couch, people started gaming. But how long will you sustain a content pipeline, which takes benefit and advantage of this innovation is question number one. Question number two, video gamers are couch potatoes. How long are you going to sweat trying to play, while essentially you are a couch potato? Because I am a gamer too, I ask this to myself.
But that said, great innovation, they have advanced the market, they have brought new people into the category and that’s what the industry needs.
GG: Motion sensing to the Nintendo Wii, the Blu-Ray to the Sony PS3, what’s there to Microsoft Xbox 360?
MA: The latest, greatest entertainment system and platform on the planet and the best games. This is about games. The box does not create the business, the games create the business. And the best games are on the Xbox 360. Anywhere in the world, any chart you take or any review you read or any analyst you ask, the best games are on the Xbox 360. And if you look at figures and look at the total spends the games industry has had in the last 11 odd months since Sony and Nintendo launched, the total amount of money spent on hardware and software accessories combined for Sony and Nintendo is less than the money spent by gamers on the Xbox 360 and this is NPD data, which just released on the Xbox 360. And if my memory serves me right, it is 2.7 billion dollars worth of spends that gamers have done just on the Xbox 360 platforms, including games, accessories and everything, whereas if you combine both of them, that’s not the case. So very clearly, we are the leader and history has shown that the console to hit the first 10 million has always won that generation and I think when history writes itself, you will see Xbox 360 as the winner of this generation.
GG: You are really active on the forums. There were many harsh words exchanged sometime back due to the delay of BioShock. What is your take on that?
MA: I don’t know if the harsh words were two-way? It was one way and gamers were expressing their frustrations, which is fair. But I think it is our job to educate the market as well. For example, if you look at BioShock, the theory that was propounded on some of the forum threads was that we were delaying it because of Halo 3. But Halo 3 is a cult by itself and not the case.
BioShock is a Take-Two game, who has decided to do a second party publisher deal with Microsoft in India and large parts of Asia and they have decided that the market date for Asia would be 14th September on shelf. Now 14th September in Singapore does not mean 14th September in India. Why? Because the product has to come into a port, clear customs and it has to move through 12, 20, 50 different locations, then get built. It is a complex country that we live in. But still, we’ve worked hard at the backend and insured that BioShock becomes available in line with the Asia launch.
Today if you walk down to a retail store, because 14th was a Friday and maybe some stores didn’t get it on a Saturday or Sunday. But today that product is available at retail, which means very clearly, if the publisher or the content owner decides a particular release date for Asia, we have to live with it, and these are limitations. And the last point I want to make to all the people who tend to get frustrated and rightly so is, this a journey that has just begun. You cannot begin to accept a market as mature as a western economy, when the market is not there. It is a step by step journey that we have to go through together. We are here to take their feedback, continuously improve and that’s where it is and that’s the way we look at it. It helps us keep us on our toes and that’s what becomes better.
GG: Elite, why isn’t it available at the retailers or dealers?
MA: Great Question! The reason, one of the things that if you look at our strategy, when we launched, for the console, we had always said that we are going to focus on the top seven or eight cities as a focus. Because, obviously, the large predominant gamer population is there and also the logistics to spread it out is extremely complex in the country given the tax regime. So when we see that, we started receiving a lot of feedback beyond the 8 cities that how do you make a product available to me in a Ludhiana, or in a Ranchi or a Bhubaneshwar. The only way to do that in a fast, efficient manner is by doing something online where anybody can go on to the website, pay online and the box gets delivered to their home.
So that’s why we have tried this unique pilot so to speak with Indiatimes and so far the results have been encouraging and I think I would give it another 6 weeks to really pass judgments, whether it is a successful pilot or not. These are novel business models that the market dynamics actually forced upon us to try out to really broaden the appeal of the product and make it available to a wider audience rather than the top eight cities.
GG: The Xbox Ring of Death. Even in Delhi there are reports besides gamers, even the dealers are not ready to take the Xbox 360 due to this issue. What is your view on it?
MA: Dealers are not ready to take it is a wrong thing. Dealers aren’t supposed to take it. If a product goes faulty, the warranty process is very simple. The consumer needs to call a toll free number and register his complaint. The warranty has been extended to 3 years. Nobody denies that there is a problem and I don’t think anywhere in the world, will you find a company, which has accepted that there is such a big problem and we have done what is the right thing for the consumer, which is saying, “extend warranty from date of purchase”, irrespective of date of purchase to 3 years. So you buy a console today, then from today three years hence. If you bought a console last year, three years from that day, if you bought a console in the US in November 2005, from that day three years. So that’s one.
Second, in India, dealers aren’t supposed to take the box back; you call the toll free number and tell them that the box is bad. The moment you get a ticket, somebody appears at your doorstep with a new unit, replaces the faulty one and gives a new one to you. Sometimes in the supply chain, there might be days, where instead of taking two days, you might take three days and instead of two days, it might be done in four hours, which is logistics, which may happen. But I think, again if you read the forums, one of the resounding things that every gamer talks about is the excellent customer support that Microsoft has provided on the Xbox 360, for that matter, that kind of consumer support does not exist for any consumer electronic was a wide brush across the category.
GG: One more thing that we would like to ask you is about modding, it has been made legal in Australia from last year. The courts there said that people can mod their products. What is your take on that? The other thing is piracy, how are you battling piracy in India, usually even Windows are all pirated. Pirated games are available on the street. How are you tackling it?
MA: Good question! I can’t comment on the Australia bit because I am not aware of it. I am not aware of what the legal judgment has been there. Firstly, as far as the Xbox 360 is concerned, there is no mod chip available today. What is available is a small firmware hack that we have reports about, which is unstable at best and that also once you log into Live and that patch updates itself and that window is closed. And that also, I haven’t seen a lot of firmware hacks of that purported solution happening at all, that’s two.
Third, piracy as a plague afflicts the software industry largely and as Microsoft, who better than us knows the pain of it. Our job is to educate and empower and the analogy that I always use is, if you look at a movie, you go to your rental guy, get a pirated DVD or a VCD and start watching that movie. I guarantee to you, ten times out of ten that experience will be that it will stop and start, it will be pathetic, it will be very jarring. On the climax it will stop. That’s what the experience will be. Same is the case with games; it is an experience you are going through. Imagine playing Gears of War and being on Act 5 and about to kill General Raam and your game freezes on you. I am not sure if you will be pretty happy with it, after 15 hours of grueling gameplay!
GG: But that can even happen because of the Red Ring of Death…
MA: It could, but the game save will not go away, even if the red ring, your hard disk taking the save. Whereas here nothing is given. So very clearly it is about education and empowerment and that’s the two things we continue to do and that’s what we are focused on. On Xbox 360 fortunately, that is not a problem because the hardware is very, very secure.
GG: But about modding, if other countries start legalizing modding, what will you do? Will you support it?
MA: I will have to cross that bridge when we come to it in India. I think we are far, far away. Right now, the games industry is a speck on the radar for the worldwide scenario. We’ll have to cross that. I haven’t thought through that and I honestly think, we will have to evolve our thinking and position when we cross the bridge and when we get there.
GG: Does business extend to personal choices as well? Are you all in to gaming? What are your favourite games?
SS: I have been a gamer all along, ever since my school days, PC gaming. I hadn’t been a console gamer till I moved into Microsoft. I am a hardcore gamer, so is my son who is seven years old. We are kind of a gaming family. I like first person shooters, so I like Gears of War, BioShock, Halo 3. The PC arena, we grew up playing a lot of games such as Prince of Persia, stuff like that. It’s been long since I have played PC games. I am more hooked to the console games rather than the PC games.
AG: I was not at all a gamer, just started to hook on to gaming and started playing since joining Microsoft. I play normal games such as car racing. I am not a hardcore gamer at all, casual at best.
MA: I have been gaming since 1988, long before a lot of people were born. Started gaming on the BBC, which was phosphorus machine, which had 64 kilobytes of memory. First game, Pac-man, still one of my favorites. I have played all along on the PC, on handhelds, cell phones, you name the platform and I have gamed on it. All time favourite, forever, Age of Empires, it’s like I am addicted to it. Play a lot of console games. Don’t get enough time to do it though. Gaming is now something that I am passing on to my son and my daughter. I have a ten year old girl and a seven year old son. They love playing. My son really loves the hardcore stuff and you know, obviously being a boy, the whole genes and DNA is completely different, from a gaming perspective. And my girl loves a lot of casual, simple, easy to play games. She loves Viva Piñata, which again I think extends the whole gaming experience to a totally new audience, but loves the causal games, you know, Marble Blast Ultra or Geometry Wars: Evolved, Mahjongg, very simple stuff, pick up and play, easy to use and my wife doesn’t like it, so we have a problem there.
GG: Here’s wishing you all, all the best along with Microsoft and Halo 3, of course. Thank you so much.
MA: Thank you.