NEWS - Saturday, March 24, 2001
Seamus on Gamespot
After the XBOX keynote address at GDC Xbox technology director, Seamus Blackley, sat down with the crew from Gamespot to cover issues regarding third-party support, the incubator program, and the importance of the Japanese market as well as other topics. With the rumours abound of the XBOX not having the backing of Japanese developers, Gamespot got the scoop on what the real deal is.
GS: What do you say to people who say that the Xbox isn’t getting enough support from the Japanese market. We’ve seen the big names like Namco and Konami on the developer list, but we’re yet to see any games from the Japanese publishers.Be sure to head over and check out the whole interview.SB: There are actually a lot of games in development in Japan. One of the downsides of us being so open with the Xbox is that when there are places where we can’t be that open it seems like we screwed up. Culturally, Japanese companies don’t talk about products. So, we’re not talking about the third-party products in Japan. Everybody assumes that we don’t have any products in Japan, but that just isn’t the case. We’re probably sharing as much information about our Japanese games as any other console manufacturer has shared about their games at this stage. I think we’re in good shape there. It’s definitely a challenge for a US company, but I think we’re been pretty smart about how we’d done it--we’ve really tried to make sure that our approach in Japan is in a very Japanese way. We have a very strong Japanese office there that actually reports back to the US. It’s real Microsoft people and it’s not some backwater office out there. Unlike a lot of the US and European subsidiaries of some of the other console manufacturers. We’re seeing a lot of amazing stuff that I wish I could show you--it’s really cool.
Source: http://www.gamespot.com/
