Post by TTR Dr Payne on May 23, 2008 6:20:38 GMT -4
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EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: MS to Delist XBLA Titles
By Joe Keiser Print | Send to a friend | Email the editor
In this exclusive interview with general manager of Xbox Live Marc Whitten, Next-Gen gets all the first details on big changes to the service—including that there will be no spring dashboard update, and that underperforming XBLA titles will be removed.
ImageAccording to Whitten, XBLA titles that have been out for more than six months, have a Metacritic score of less than 65%, and have a conversion rate of less than 6% will be eligible for desliting. Microsoft will give three months of notice before these titles are removed.
Whitten also told us that there would be no spring dashboard update for Xbox 360 owners this year, saying that resources were instead focused on “building the proper infrastructure and scale for the service.” There will however be a change to DRM policy and a tool released next month that will allow 360 owners to re-license content to a single console—finally fixing the issue that forced gamers playing XBLA games to be connected to Xbox LIVE if their 360 broke down and was replaced.
Read on for the complete Q and A, which provides all the details on this news and more, including a new 1st party development studio and why the DRM issue took so long to resolve…
Next-Gen: How would you say the Xbox Live Marketplace has performed in your estimation? We understand you have some milestones you'd like to share.
Marc Whitten: Xbox LIVE Marketplace continues to perform above and beyond our wildest expectations. As we announced at GDC we have seen more than $250 million spent in marketplace since we launched and are currently supporting around 30 million downloads on the service every month. Pretty amazing to think that on an average day 1 million downloads are taking place on Xbox LIVE. I remember it took us four months after launch to hit the 10 million milestone. Now today we have sold more than 15 million songs across just a couple of titles on the service. Even our video store is currently driving more than one-third of the paid downloads on marketplace. Overall digital distribution of games and entertainment content continues to evolve at an amazingly fast pace.
And yet, despite the achievements the Marketplace has made, you're still making significant changes to the service. Why have you decided to make those changes?
Absolutely, what has happened almost overnight is that the service we built for a few hundred items mainly for a gaming audience now has over 15,000 pieces of content. The team is continuing to look at new ways to enhance the service and make it easier to find the content you want. At the same time there is a lot of incremental infrastructure work going on to be able to scale and support the 12 million members we have across 26 countries. At the same time we are evolving to meet customer’s entertainment needs.
Could you describe the changes we can expect to see in the Marketplace in the near future?
Well probably the biggest change I can share with you today is a series of new policies along with a new internal approach and investment in the Xbox LIVE Arcade business going forward. While the service has had a lot of success and now boasts over 130 titles, we think it is time to continue our focus on quality over quantity. This means that we need to allow developers more time and more space to make even bigger and better games. So we are officially increasing our XBLA game size limits dramatically from 150mb to 350mb. We are also giving publishers more flexibility in how they price their games and opening up a new 1600 Microsoft Points price point for some of these now bigger and better games. This week we already have seen a title that is taking advantage of this and getting great response, Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain Slick Precipice of Darkness, Episode One. In addition to allowing these bigger and better games we will be delisting older underperforming titles in order to keep the service focused on a section of high quality games. Finally, we are also going to be putting our money where our mouth is here and are launching a new fully funded 1st party studio which will be focused on high quality digital content creation.
What would qualify a title for delisting? Would Microsoft choose titles for delisting, or would the publisher or content creators be involved in the decision as well? Are there any titles currently on the Marketplace we can expect to be delisted in the near future?
The way it will work is that the title will need to be at least 6 months old and have a Metacritic score below 65 and a conversion rate below 6% on the service. This way titles are not just considered if they are not selling well or not getting good reviews, but actually a combination of both. We will also give a three-month notice before delisting any title. Overall I think you will find this will focus the catalogue more on larger, more immersive games and make it much easier to find the games you are looking for.
Can you explain a little bit more about the background of the new 1st party studio?
Well the main idea behind the concept is to invest deeply in developing original content that will be compelling and exclusive to Xbox LIVE. This is a place where we’ve redoubled our commitment and I’m putting both dollars and people behind new games that push the quality and the bounds of the system. Wish I could share more today, but definitely stay tuned on this, as we have some very exciting things in the works including some big original XBLA games we will be announcing soon.
Regarding the file size extension, that's a sizable increase, and the second such increase we've seen in XBLA. Why the change, and why keep any sort of restriction in this regard?
The success of the business and the boom in this new economy of digital distribution has required us to re-look at the business and allow room for growth in the future. We have heard from some of our developers that if they had as much as 350mb of space they could create some really amazing games. So we don’t want anything to hold these guys back. We will also have dedicated resources working closely with the development community to find the best content and make sure it gets the time and polish it needs to shine on our service. But we still think it is important to have some limit and be clear that Xbox LIVE Arcade titles are made to be smaller in size than retail games, quick to download and will continue to deliver on the fun pick-up and play experience that people are used to.
Last year Xbox 360 owners got a spring dashboard update in early May. It's now late May and you still haven't announced anything regarding this year's update. Should 360 owners be holding their breath for it?
We have taken a different approach this spring and spent a lot of our time and resources of building the proper infrastructure and scale for the service not just today but also into the future. So while most users will not notice any significant changes to the dashboard this spring, I can tell you that the team will be releasing a new digital rights management (DRM) tool next month that will allow you to better consolidate your licenses for downloaded content to a single Xbox and allow you the freedom to be able to play your content both online and offline.
There have been some high profile complaints on the web about how difficult it is to transfer things like XBLA game licenses to replacement 360s in the wake of an under warranty hardware failure. Would these changes to DRM policy address these issues, letting people who have experienced such failure re-license their purchases on their new Xbox so they don't have to be connected to Live to play? Are there any other sorts of changes to DRM policy being made here that would affect the end-user experience?
Yes, this new tool will officially launch next month on Xbox.com and will allow you to be able to consolidate these licenses onto one box so you can access things like Xbox LIVE Arcade games and TV show you have downloaded even if you are not online. Because this involved allowing users to re-download licenses for content that belongs to our partners it has taken some time to work out the agreements with them to allow this, but we have heard the concerns from folks about DRM and are happy to announce that everything is nearly in place to roll this out in June.
EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: MS to Delist XBLA Titles
By Joe Keiser Print | Send to a friend | Email the editor
In this exclusive interview with general manager of Xbox Live Marc Whitten, Next-Gen gets all the first details on big changes to the service—including that there will be no spring dashboard update, and that underperforming XBLA titles will be removed.
ImageAccording to Whitten, XBLA titles that have been out for more than six months, have a Metacritic score of less than 65%, and have a conversion rate of less than 6% will be eligible for desliting. Microsoft will give three months of notice before these titles are removed.
Whitten also told us that there would be no spring dashboard update for Xbox 360 owners this year, saying that resources were instead focused on “building the proper infrastructure and scale for the service.” There will however be a change to DRM policy and a tool released next month that will allow 360 owners to re-license content to a single console—finally fixing the issue that forced gamers playing XBLA games to be connected to Xbox LIVE if their 360 broke down and was replaced.
Read on for the complete Q and A, which provides all the details on this news and more, including a new 1st party development studio and why the DRM issue took so long to resolve…
Next-Gen: How would you say the Xbox Live Marketplace has performed in your estimation? We understand you have some milestones you'd like to share.
Marc Whitten: Xbox LIVE Marketplace continues to perform above and beyond our wildest expectations. As we announced at GDC we have seen more than $250 million spent in marketplace since we launched and are currently supporting around 30 million downloads on the service every month. Pretty amazing to think that on an average day 1 million downloads are taking place on Xbox LIVE. I remember it took us four months after launch to hit the 10 million milestone. Now today we have sold more than 15 million songs across just a couple of titles on the service. Even our video store is currently driving more than one-third of the paid downloads on marketplace. Overall digital distribution of games and entertainment content continues to evolve at an amazingly fast pace.
And yet, despite the achievements the Marketplace has made, you're still making significant changes to the service. Why have you decided to make those changes?
Absolutely, what has happened almost overnight is that the service we built for a few hundred items mainly for a gaming audience now has over 15,000 pieces of content. The team is continuing to look at new ways to enhance the service and make it easier to find the content you want. At the same time there is a lot of incremental infrastructure work going on to be able to scale and support the 12 million members we have across 26 countries. At the same time we are evolving to meet customer’s entertainment needs.
Could you describe the changes we can expect to see in the Marketplace in the near future?
Well probably the biggest change I can share with you today is a series of new policies along with a new internal approach and investment in the Xbox LIVE Arcade business going forward. While the service has had a lot of success and now boasts over 130 titles, we think it is time to continue our focus on quality over quantity. This means that we need to allow developers more time and more space to make even bigger and better games. So we are officially increasing our XBLA game size limits dramatically from 150mb to 350mb. We are also giving publishers more flexibility in how they price their games and opening up a new 1600 Microsoft Points price point for some of these now bigger and better games. This week we already have seen a title that is taking advantage of this and getting great response, Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain Slick Precipice of Darkness, Episode One. In addition to allowing these bigger and better games we will be delisting older underperforming titles in order to keep the service focused on a section of high quality games. Finally, we are also going to be putting our money where our mouth is here and are launching a new fully funded 1st party studio which will be focused on high quality digital content creation.
What would qualify a title for delisting? Would Microsoft choose titles for delisting, or would the publisher or content creators be involved in the decision as well? Are there any titles currently on the Marketplace we can expect to be delisted in the near future?
The way it will work is that the title will need to be at least 6 months old and have a Metacritic score below 65 and a conversion rate below 6% on the service. This way titles are not just considered if they are not selling well or not getting good reviews, but actually a combination of both. We will also give a three-month notice before delisting any title. Overall I think you will find this will focus the catalogue more on larger, more immersive games and make it much easier to find the games you are looking for.
Can you explain a little bit more about the background of the new 1st party studio?
Well the main idea behind the concept is to invest deeply in developing original content that will be compelling and exclusive to Xbox LIVE. This is a place where we’ve redoubled our commitment and I’m putting both dollars and people behind new games that push the quality and the bounds of the system. Wish I could share more today, but definitely stay tuned on this, as we have some very exciting things in the works including some big original XBLA games we will be announcing soon.
Regarding the file size extension, that's a sizable increase, and the second such increase we've seen in XBLA. Why the change, and why keep any sort of restriction in this regard?
The success of the business and the boom in this new economy of digital distribution has required us to re-look at the business and allow room for growth in the future. We have heard from some of our developers that if they had as much as 350mb of space they could create some really amazing games. So we don’t want anything to hold these guys back. We will also have dedicated resources working closely with the development community to find the best content and make sure it gets the time and polish it needs to shine on our service. But we still think it is important to have some limit and be clear that Xbox LIVE Arcade titles are made to be smaller in size than retail games, quick to download and will continue to deliver on the fun pick-up and play experience that people are used to.
Last year Xbox 360 owners got a spring dashboard update in early May. It's now late May and you still haven't announced anything regarding this year's update. Should 360 owners be holding their breath for it?
We have taken a different approach this spring and spent a lot of our time and resources of building the proper infrastructure and scale for the service not just today but also into the future. So while most users will not notice any significant changes to the dashboard this spring, I can tell you that the team will be releasing a new digital rights management (DRM) tool next month that will allow you to better consolidate your licenses for downloaded content to a single Xbox and allow you the freedom to be able to play your content both online and offline.
There have been some high profile complaints on the web about how difficult it is to transfer things like XBLA game licenses to replacement 360s in the wake of an under warranty hardware failure. Would these changes to DRM policy address these issues, letting people who have experienced such failure re-license their purchases on their new Xbox so they don't have to be connected to Live to play? Are there any other sorts of changes to DRM policy being made here that would affect the end-user experience?
Yes, this new tool will officially launch next month on Xbox.com and will allow you to be able to consolidate these licenses onto one box so you can access things like Xbox LIVE Arcade games and TV show you have downloaded even if you are not online. Because this involved allowing users to re-download licenses for content that belongs to our partners it has taken some time to work out the agreements with them to allow this, but we have heard the concerns from folks about DRM and are happy to announce that everything is nearly in place to roll this out in June.