Xbox chief sees games reaching a broader base
Xbox chief sees games reaching a broader base
By Kim Peterson
Seattle Times technology reporter
Robbie Bach is the executive at Microsoft who guides Xbox development. His title reflects it: senior vice president of the Home & Entertainment division and chief Xbox officer.
Bach, who joined the company in 1988 as a product manager for Microsoft Works, met with The Seattle Times yesterday at the Electronics Entertainment Expo, or E3, in Los Angeles to talk about the video-game industry.
Q. How is E3 going for you so far?
Bach: For us it's going great. We had a great briefing Monday night and had a lot of positive feedback about that. Really, people came back and said, "Wow, you guys have a full portfolio of games. You've got some titles we think are going to make Xbox sell this holiday."
And that's really the big point here — to start getting people excited and giving people a sense of what's coming. We feel very good about how things are going.
Q. What was the most significant announcement you've made at E3?
Bach: I think the biggest thing that people should walk away with from the show for us is that we have the depth and breadth of games to make Xbox even more successful. Not just the games for the gaming audience, but the games that reach out to younger audiences, older audiences, women, etc. And we have some cool blockbusters that are going to knock people away.
Q. What do you think people are responding to the most?
Bach: If you go back to the briefing, the visceral response to "Halo 2" and that demo is amazing. The response to "Doom 3" ... is amazing. I think Music Mixer (an add-on that turns the Xbox into a music machine) in many ways gets a response generally from a broader audience, not so much from the hard-core gamers but from the people who are more into general entertainment. We see more women excited about that, which is cool for us because we start to reach out into the broader audience.
Q. Sony's announcement of the PSP handheld gaming device makes Xbox as of now the only console without an accompanying handheld.
Bach: Well, Sony doesn't have one either. That was an announcement to plan an announcement.
Q. Well, presuming they come through with this, is Microsoft interested in getting into this?
Bach: Our perspective right now is we're very focused on making Xbox an integral part of our approach with consumers in the home. That's plenty of work for us to do right now. It is really a very different market. Different dynamics, a different set of issues. So we're really focused on making sure Xbox does a great job, and I don't want to get distracted.
Q. You say you want to be focused on the home, and handhelds would take the focus outside of the home.
Bach: The real question in the handheld market is: Are you about handheld gaming or are you about handheld information sharing? We're very much about communication and information sharing. Microsoft has Smartphone, we have Pocket PC. You saw on Monday night Xbox Live is going to be able to send alerts to your Pocket PC, to your Smartphone.
So we're very much in that marketplace, but we're focused on the broader, communication and information-sharing capabilities of that marketplace and not so much on the gaming space.
Q. Do you think the handheld market is big enough for the PSP?
Bach: I don't know. Right now Sony didn't announce enough to (form) any real opinion. They basically said in 18 months we're going to bring a product and they showed a memory disc. We don't know who the target audience is, we don't know what the product looks like, we don't know how big it is. We don't know price, we don't know where they're going to sell it. I mean, it's a fine announcement but it's not enough to have any good discussion about anything.
Q. Microsoft loses money on Xbox consoles. Is the company OK with that?
Bach: We're on a long-term strategy to invest in the category, and we're right on track with the business plan we've set for ourselves. We feel very good about where Xbox is, both from a business perspective and from a market-acceptance perspective.
We think we've done amazing work in these past two years to get to the point where we are now, and we're now driving towards reaching industry leadership. Long term, the business has to make money, and we're on track to do that, but this is not a business that you enter quickly and suddenly make money. It requires investment.
Q. What's the tradeoff in losing money? I assume you will gain something later on. Is that market share?
Bach: Well, you gain a couple of things. One, you gain a solid base of customers for both Xbox and Xbox Live. Second, we gain retail support and we get support from third-party publishers, which is really a critical part of the business. Basically, the way the business works is you build your installed base of consoles and that brings more great games.
And you're seeing that in E3. We had a difficult time deciding what to show in our briefing and what to show in the booth because we have a lot of great games. And once you get that positive momentum rolling, then it really opens up new opportunities in the business model and I think that's what we're going to see in the next couple of years.
Q. What can you say about the work being done on the next Xbox console?
Bach: We're really not talking about it right now. Obviously we're committed to the future of the business and we're doing work in that space. There isn't much to say.
We have a lot of things to talk about with what we've got today. Xbox itself today is about continuous innovation and you're going to continue to see a lot of new things, things like Music Mixer, the things we announced with Xbox Live and new capabilities there. There's plenty to talk about in the near term without worrying too much about the future.
Q. What game are you playing now?
Bach: My son is a big sports fanatic, so we're big into sports games. He's playing some baseball right now so we've been playing some baseball. That'll switch to football as we get into August so we go through that cycle. He and I do video games together, so Splinter Cell was a big deal. There were about three months where that was what we played.
There are a couple of new games coming out that I haven't had a chance to play much with. "Castle Wolfenstein," which is a game from Activision, which is a live game, which is a great game. I'm really looking forward to "Brute Force," which is a Microsoft game that's coming out in a few weeks.
Q. Was there some experience in your life that made you want to get into video games? Was there one video game that really had an impact on you?
Bach: I got into the business before this happened, but the thing that made me think about the business differently was the experience that we had with "Halo" when it first came out. I always view video games as games. But Halo made me realize the creative possibilities of what could happen in the medium.
Because "Halo" is a game, that's true, but there's also a story. There's a plot. There are themes, there are morals that go through the story. And now, with "Halo 2," we're starting to talk about the next generation, if you will, of what's in the story. That made me think about video games in a much broader context. It made me think about it in the context of storytelling, in the context of movies, in the context of if you play "Halo" how the music affects the way you experience a game. It really made me realize the possibilities in the industry for what we can create over the next five years if we really apply ourselves.
Q. There is so much talk about Microsoft and who you're buying and who you may not be buying. What's your acquisition strategy?
Bach: The overall strategy hasn't changed for five years that I've been involved in the business. We look at this and say we work with a lot of developers. Sometimes, that means we publish their titles and sometimes that means we end up buying them.
The focus has been on small developers with specific franchises that we think can help either the PC platform or the Xbox platform and continue to drive innovation there. Publishers have always been the things where you hear the most rumors, but it's a really difficult challenge. Pick somebody, and that means I pay for cross-platform revenue that I can't use, because they're doing something on Sony or something on Nintendo. Usually with those big companies, they have a lot of assets and people that we already have. I don't need a retail sales force, I don't need a marketing team.
So they just tend to be difficult acquisitions to justify, and they're also difficult to manage because they tend to be big and have complicated organizations, and our approach has really been more organic growth from within and finding the right specific pieces.
Think about Bungie. They're the guys who created "Halo." That was a great acquisition for us because it really fit a need we have and they are an amazing group. A very talented team.
Think about Rare. It was a much bigger acquisition but still an independent developer, perhaps the best or one of the top two or three independent developers in the world. And they now have three games at E3. So that's been more of where our focus is. I can list 20 game companies and we've been rumored to buy all of them. That's probably not going to change.
