Robbie Bach, one of the central figures in the Xbox division recently came over for the launch of the Xbox Live service in India. So I had a chance to sit down and talk to him about a whole range of stuff from Jackson’s Halo to a built in HD DVD 360.
GG: Sony would love to get their hands on Halo, which title would Microsoft want from Sony’s Lineup?
RB: Aaahh…Really, Honestly right now I’m happy with our line up the way it is, I don’t have any specific area and say oh gosh wow that something we’d like. They (Sony) have some good titles and franchises and we have franchises that compete with them pretty effectively. Lets say Gran Turismo, well Forza’s a great product and is doing really well in the marketplace and we think we can compete with that product, right now I look at our title line up and feel very good about it. I am happy to say, I’m happy to take our title lineup and stack it up against what you get on any other console.
GG: What about Metal Gear Solid 4?
RB: Well we’ll see, Metal Gear Solid 4 is not here yet, certainly it’s a great game and has been a great franchise, they’ve (Kojima productions) done great work historically, on the Xbox you’ll see a lot of great Splinter cell work, those two end up competing with each other pretty aggressively. So again it’s sort of the same thing. It’s not clear that I look at it and say oh gosh that’s something that I absolutely have to have. We’d love to have it on the platform but I think I have a product that’ll do well in that category.
GG: Microsoft has a policy on not commenting on rumors, is Perfect dark 2 in works?
RB: (Laughs… and laughs really loud and says ) No comment to rumors and starts laughing again. (There is this glint in his eye that states the obvious, it’s coming all right, patience is the key here).
GG: An internal spokesman at Toshiba recently spoke about a 360 with an in built HD-DVD drive in the works, is this true?
RB: Now what we’ve done with HD-DVD is we’ve made it available as a peripheral and frankly we do that because most of our customers do not want to send the extra expense that has an HD drive built into the product, for us it’s a great option to offer to people, we are big supporters of HD DVD and have worked with Toshiba, but we don’t have any plans to do anything about it right now.
GG: When do we see Don Mattrick and his bunch of tattoos?
RB: Chuckles…I don’t know whether you’ll see any tattoos on Don. I’ll have to discuss that with him! Don’s been focusing quite logically the first few months on working with the team and getting to know the team better, kind of working internally with Microsoft and I suspect as we get towards the end of the year, next year we’ll start to see him more in public. He’ll fill the job slightly differently than Peter did, I think Peter was more charismatic and public and more on the marketing and promotional side Don will be working more on the product side. In terms of hours you’ll probably see a little less of him, but you will see him publicly in the near future.
GG: Any details on Peter’s Jackson’s Halo.
RB: Well yeah, Peter Jackson is Peter Jackson and I think he’s going to produce great stuff and I’m excited about it. He’ll bring his creativity to the table with the Bungie team. I think there will be some real fancy stuff.
GG: Any chances of a price cut in India?
RB: When it comes to pricing, the thing we are focusing on is that people are getting a great value on the 360. Obviously pricing will have some constraints with respect to duties because of which we have difficulties in driving the price down. And this is somewhat unique to India I must say. But what we are doing is bundling the console with high definition TVs and adding value to the product by bundling games with the product. So when a consumer buys a 360 they get a great value. They are paying a certain amount of money that’s true, and we are making sure that those people get a great value. (No price cuts!)
GG: Microsoft broke off with Bungie, FASA studios closed down, Bizarre, Pandemic and Bioware work for Activision and EA. So has this affected MGS in any way?
RB: Let’s make sure we are very clear on the record. Bungie Studios still has a very close relationship with Microsoft. They will continue to do work with us and will continue to build products for us and we’ll have access to their content. We’ve changed the nature economic relationship with them, but they are absolutely going be working with us and we value that relation.
The other thing I’ll say is in the content space, you are constantly moving in and out with different producers, different content companies. What we have here is some companies who have decided to go in different directions or been bought by somebody else. We’ve also established new relations with people and you’ll see those new relations come forward over time. I’m actually very confident about Microsoft’s lineup next year! People forget that we have several great studios internally who are doing incredible work and will continue to do so, and I think we’ll be just fine with the titles that we have in the next 12-24 months.
My dictaphone had conked off due to low battery, so here’s a few more things that I spoke to Robbie about which I could not get on tape.
The issue of certain games struggling to fit onto the DVD, Robbie said that they chose the DVD because it was an inexpensive and widely used option. Developers were used to building content for that kind of format and Microsoft has been regularly assisting them in all possible ways to get the best content onto their platform.
More strategy games hitting the 360, well a lot of it actually depends on the publishers. There have been a lot of successful strategy games on the 360, but this particular genre in gaming has been dominated by the PCs and will probably continue to be so.
Neelesh Mukherjee