There some really good stuff here and i'll just post some of the things that immedialy jumped out at me but yea, some very interesting things in the full read. I'm getting more & more interested in the whole Natal thing but that's not to say I ever want to give up the option of using my 360 controller. :P
Any thoughts, feel free.
First there is this:
Okay, and you've got Reach coming out next year. Any idea when the Halo Reach beta will show up?
No, not yet. The game is actually coming along really well. I would say as well as any game that Bungie's worked on. And our kind of internal playing that we're doing right now is showing that this could be a really special release for us, together, something where the quality might set a new bar.
Did the split between Bungie and Microsoft earlier have any effect on that game?
If it did, we're seeing a pretty positive game, so ...
Maybe you should break up with all the other guys, too.
[Laughs.] No, no. Bungie remains very committed to building great games. Halo is near and dear to that studio's heart, as it is for us as a publisher. The relationship between us and Bungie remains strong. And I think ODST and Reach are just the next examples of us doing great things together.
What about the Peter Jackson project? Why did the bottom fall out there?
For us, when we step back and we start looking at the Halo franchise, we want to make sure that we're ... You brought up the term earlier, we're not kind of over-saturating the market with Halo content. We're not just doing things because there's, say, some kind of revenue opportunity there. But we want to do things that time, that really sync with the overall franchise plan and help tell parts of the story that are important to our customers. And, I think, Peter's a great director, a great story teller and seems to be doing great things. And we continue to stay focus on making Halo what it is.
Do you think there's a possibility of the movie coming back into play?
The Halo movie, you know, it could. I think about Halo as something that's very important to us and something that we wouldn't want to jeopardize the quality of the IP by getting into a space where we didn't have shared goals with the partner and that the timing worked. There's so many variables when you take two different creative industries and try to come up with the right property, the right shipping product at the right time, and make sure both people have enough time to focus on the quality. It's just a delicate balance. And I don't want to get into a situation where we're not completely comfortable with what we're going to ship.
And also this:
Speaking of Rare, what are they up to these days?
Well, obviously, Rare was instrumental to shipping Avatars in a NXE. They really did a lot of the background work and the work that people are using inside the Dash, which I thought was great. And Rare has shipped great games in their history, but actually [having] built part of the operating system on their own and [to] ship it inside the Dash, I thought was a great accomplishment.
You know, now they have 20, 30 million people and are building Avatars using their tech. I thought that was great. I think George Andreas, who is one of the creative directors there, was in the press not too long [ago] talking about looking at Natal and what some of the ideas are. I think we're coming into a world now that really maps to what Rare's strength is. And we're going to see some really great things from that studio in the next year or so.
Some good stuff for Natal?
Yeah, absolutely.
If you look at the Natal launch, and it's been said to be on par with a console launch, do you think it's safe to draw conclusions about the Xbox 360's overall lifespan?
We started Xbox 360 with an investment in technology that we thought could grow with us. We realized Microsoft is a platform company. We're a software company. We can build hardware, but at the core we build operating systems and experiences, and we wanted to make sure that 360 was a hardware platform that was capable for us, that we could evolve on top with the cores inside -- this GPU and CPU and memory technology that we had. And that's been proven to be true.
NXE last fall: we rewrote the complete operating system of the machine and really added, I think, some great new functionality for our customers. Natal is something that we'll ship and when it ships it will work with every 360 in the market. I think that's a great statement on the technology that's inside the 360. Customers have invested in that and letting them get the most out of their investment is going to be important. And I think the future for us on top of 360 remains strong and will for years to come.
http://www.joystiq.com/2009/10/14/interview-microsoft-game-studios-phil-spencer/
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