What do you think of Nintendo's new handheld?
Allard: The DS? That touch-screen thing? Awesome. Awesome.
Have you had a go on it yourself?
Allard: No I haven't touched it, but it's just genius. I think it's a great, great, great idea. I didn't understand the dual-screen thing, the Metroid map, blah blah blah, whatever. I think that touch-screen is going to revolutionise the way kids communicate. I think it's text-messaging for kids. They're gonna scribble notes in class or on the bus on wireless network and stuff. It's going to be awesome. But I think its for the same demographic that the Game Boy is.
And PSP?
Allard: I'm skeptical that people will want it. The people that buy PlayStations have cell phones. I don't know.. They may have iPods, but I'm not sure they're going to carry that thing [PSP] around in their pocket or around their neck or whatever - it's very big. [But] it is a beautiful screen, and I like the analogue stick.
Are you in any way envious that you didn't have a handheld to show off at E3?
Allard: I'm thrilled not to be in the handheld [market]. I'm absolutely positively thrilled that we don't have a handheld. I think it's a huge distraction. I think it makes perfect sense for Nintendo, I think that the most important part of their business is the handheld and I think they've done a great job with DS. But, you know, I think the challenge with a handheld with the demographic that we chase with the Xbox is the choice, right?.
Tell me the number one selling cell phone in the world - make and model?
Erm...Nokia something or other? I don't know
Allard: You don't know, you don't know. You don't. And if we all pull them out of our pockets right now we all have different ones. Size, UI, camera - those are the three things that I wanted, and I made my decision. OK, you like text-messaging, so you went and bought one that had the right kind of buttons or whatever. Or maybe because of the colour - I don't know... We all made different decisions on our cell phones.
With the plethora of digital devices, mobile devices, and turn-over of these things... We all buy them, on a high frequency as well, right? I think it's a really tough proposition to say 'Go buy a $300 thing that'll become a $200 thing that you keep for five years and that you put media in that doesn't evolve at the same rate as all those other handheld devices.'
What I want to do is I want to move towards a model where you think about... This is how Jason Jones and the team think about Halo - they about create a world, create some characters, create some conflict, put some rules around those characters and the conflict and you design some maps, you analyse the gameplay and then you build an experience.
And the experience that they build right now is a five inch disc for a high end gaming console - that's the only experience that they project. But you could think about so many different experiences. Just take the simplest cell phone in the world, you could imagine that experience being projected... Take the Halo experience and project it anywhere there's a screen and a button.
So then you take the simplest phone in the world, very simple screen and a button. There's a pattern game that lets you repair the Warthog for your team.
It's a stupid example on one level, but you're at and airport and you walk up to an airport kiosk and it's a really crappy web browser, no 3D or anything else. Go see what you're clan's up to, see where you are in the rankings, go schedule your next practice session with your clan. Maybe you do some strategy stuff and you decide how you're going to tackle a map or whatever else and you do some shouting at people.
How cool would that be on a high end PC? Maybe have an RTS view, and you zoom out of the world and you can actually think about some of the strategy stuff instead of just the tactics. And then in your living room or wherever with your surround sound, yeah you play the experience that you can see right now. But the Halo world can be so much more than the Halo world is right now.
We don't need to go build a Microsoft-branded handheld device that says 'You've got to play it on this'. What I want to do is I want to project those experiences anywhere there's a screen. And you know, the fact that we build this thing it's kind of an artefact of the business. It's not what we aspire to do. We don't want to be a hardware company, we don't want to make more of these things, we make it only because that's the way the business works.
But it's not long-term sustainable. I don't think 20 years from now you're going to go to a store and there's going to be two different game machines you can buy - because there's going to be 150 game machines you can buy, just like DVD players and televisions. Name one consumer electronic product other than a game console where there's only one of them and you can say 'The number one thing in that category is...'.
You can't do it with televisions, you can't do it with cell phones, you can't do it with PCs, you can't with DVD players, you can't do it with anything. You can't do it with CD players... I mean, name it? It's so upside down.
I think getting trapped in that and trying to apply that same mentality in the handheld space is really risky. You look at N-Gage. I think N-Gage, you can say there was a lot of execution issues around that idea. That's a tough sell, to say I want to go sell tens of millions of one model of a cell phone that doesn't evolve, that plays games too. That's tough.
But the game developers love the fact that it's a single platform, so they would love for you to go get tens of millions of those things. So our vision is, we go and we build the XNA platform, which is a software platform, that runs on top of a multitude of devices and you can go target that. The developer's not thinking about the hardware, it's thinking about the software. That's what we did with Windows.
Peter Moore told us it was your idea to do the TV-show pisstake of Sony during your conference, which came across really well. Were you worried about offending Sony too much? Was it fun to make?
Allard: Yeah I mean we were just having fun. I mean, for crying out loud, the one thing that we've learnt - we've learnt a lot of things actually in the five years that we've been doing this business - [that] this is entertainment, you've got to lighten up a little bit. Our press conferences used to be all these numbers and stuff, and it's kind of dry, and this is supposed to be a games console.
I walked out on stage to greet 5,000 people that were going to work really hard for the week and try to get their heads wrapped around the industry - what do they want to see?
They don't want to see boring, dry slides. They killed themselves to get there on Monday night from all over the world, and you should sit back and have a little bit of fun. We felt... The Apprentice is very apt.
One of reasons we chose it is not only because it's timely from a cultural point of view but it's also - and something that I favour quite a lot,= - it's the only reality show I've ever liked... It's very apt because in the program what happens is they get these assignments every week, they have these teams, and at the beginning of the show one team won five assignments in a row.
And then the sixth assignment the other team won, and they're like 'Finally we won one, what a relief. We're not complete losers'. And if you look at Xbox versus PlayStation, they've just been beating us and beating us and beating us and with online and Live we finally won one. We finally won an assignment so that's why we chose to do the online thing and we picked on ourselves, we had fun with it.
We know you're not talking about next-gen hardware, but can you at least confirm that you've made a final decision on the hardware, behind the scenes, on exactly what you're actually going to be doing?
Allard: Pretty much, yes. One thing that we think about as we move forward, one is going to be even more flexibility and more choice. I think consumers really want more choice, and there's got to be choice, and we have that flexibility in our plans. We're trying to... You know, think of it, the next generation. This is Xbox, it's the box for DirectX, we tried to take the best hardware we could find out there in the short period that we did to build the hardware manifestation of the DirectX platform.
The next generation is sort of the hardware manifestation of the XNA platform. Think of XNA as sort of the successor, if you will, to DirectX. That's how we're thinking about it, and when you think about it that way and you think about it being a software platform driving the hardware, it allows you to think about hardware a little differently. I think there'll be a couple of surprises... But, ah, we've made decisions; the team's locked.
Have you decided on the name as well?
Allard: The team is locked [laughs]! It's remarkable when you think about it. We were still signing contracts, we didn't have any publishers lined up at this point in time, you know last cycle. We're so far ahead from where we were last cycle this cycle. We really know what needs to be done and we have the lead time to do it really well; and if we do all the things and it all comes together and we're first to market, I think that will bode well for our success in the market.
Allard: The DS? That touch-screen thing? Awesome. Awesome.
Have you had a go on it yourself?
Allard: No I haven't touched it, but it's just genius. I think it's a great, great, great idea. I didn't understand the dual-screen thing, the Metroid map, blah blah blah, whatever. I think that touch-screen is going to revolutionise the way kids communicate. I think it's text-messaging for kids. They're gonna scribble notes in class or on the bus on wireless network and stuff. It's going to be awesome. But I think its for the same demographic that the Game Boy is.
And PSP?
Allard: I'm skeptical that people will want it. The people that buy PlayStations have cell phones. I don't know.. They may have iPods, but I'm not sure they're going to carry that thing [PSP] around in their pocket or around their neck or whatever - it's very big. [But] it is a beautiful screen, and I like the analogue stick.
Are you in any way envious that you didn't have a handheld to show off at E3?
Allard: I'm thrilled not to be in the handheld [market]. I'm absolutely positively thrilled that we don't have a handheld. I think it's a huge distraction. I think it makes perfect sense for Nintendo, I think that the most important part of their business is the handheld and I think they've done a great job with DS. But, you know, I think the challenge with a handheld with the demographic that we chase with the Xbox is the choice, right?.
Tell me the number one selling cell phone in the world - make and model?
Erm...Nokia something or other? I don't know
Allard: You don't know, you don't know. You don't. And if we all pull them out of our pockets right now we all have different ones. Size, UI, camera - those are the three things that I wanted, and I made my decision. OK, you like text-messaging, so you went and bought one that had the right kind of buttons or whatever. Or maybe because of the colour - I don't know... We all made different decisions on our cell phones.
With the plethora of digital devices, mobile devices, and turn-over of these things... We all buy them, on a high frequency as well, right? I think it's a really tough proposition to say 'Go buy a $300 thing that'll become a $200 thing that you keep for five years and that you put media in that doesn't evolve at the same rate as all those other handheld devices.'
What I want to do is I want to move towards a model where you think about... This is how Jason Jones and the team think about Halo - they about create a world, create some characters, create some conflict, put some rules around those characters and the conflict and you design some maps, you analyse the gameplay and then you build an experience.
And the experience that they build right now is a five inch disc for a high end gaming console - that's the only experience that they project. But you could think about so many different experiences. Just take the simplest cell phone in the world, you could imagine that experience being projected... Take the Halo experience and project it anywhere there's a screen and a button.
So then you take the simplest phone in the world, very simple screen and a button. There's a pattern game that lets you repair the Warthog for your team.
It's a stupid example on one level, but you're at and airport and you walk up to an airport kiosk and it's a really crappy web browser, no 3D or anything else. Go see what you're clan's up to, see where you are in the rankings, go schedule your next practice session with your clan. Maybe you do some strategy stuff and you decide how you're going to tackle a map or whatever else and you do some shouting at people.
How cool would that be on a high end PC? Maybe have an RTS view, and you zoom out of the world and you can actually think about some of the strategy stuff instead of just the tactics. And then in your living room or wherever with your surround sound, yeah you play the experience that you can see right now. But the Halo world can be so much more than the Halo world is right now.
We don't need to go build a Microsoft-branded handheld device that says 'You've got to play it on this'. What I want to do is I want to project those experiences anywhere there's a screen. And you know, the fact that we build this thing it's kind of an artefact of the business. It's not what we aspire to do. We don't want to be a hardware company, we don't want to make more of these things, we make it only because that's the way the business works.
But it's not long-term sustainable. I don't think 20 years from now you're going to go to a store and there's going to be two different game machines you can buy - because there's going to be 150 game machines you can buy, just like DVD players and televisions. Name one consumer electronic product other than a game console where there's only one of them and you can say 'The number one thing in that category is...'.
You can't do it with televisions, you can't do it with cell phones, you can't do it with PCs, you can't with DVD players, you can't do it with anything. You can't do it with CD players... I mean, name it? It's so upside down.
I think getting trapped in that and trying to apply that same mentality in the handheld space is really risky. You look at N-Gage. I think N-Gage, you can say there was a lot of execution issues around that idea. That's a tough sell, to say I want to go sell tens of millions of one model of a cell phone that doesn't evolve, that plays games too. That's tough.
But the game developers love the fact that it's a single platform, so they would love for you to go get tens of millions of those things. So our vision is, we go and we build the XNA platform, which is a software platform, that runs on top of a multitude of devices and you can go target that. The developer's not thinking about the hardware, it's thinking about the software. That's what we did with Windows.
Peter Moore told us it was your idea to do the TV-show pisstake of Sony during your conference, which came across really well. Were you worried about offending Sony too much? Was it fun to make?
Allard: Yeah I mean we were just having fun. I mean, for crying out loud, the one thing that we've learnt - we've learnt a lot of things actually in the five years that we've been doing this business - [that] this is entertainment, you've got to lighten up a little bit. Our press conferences used to be all these numbers and stuff, and it's kind of dry, and this is supposed to be a games console.
I walked out on stage to greet 5,000 people that were going to work really hard for the week and try to get their heads wrapped around the industry - what do they want to see?
They don't want to see boring, dry slides. They killed themselves to get there on Monday night from all over the world, and you should sit back and have a little bit of fun. We felt... The Apprentice is very apt.
One of reasons we chose it is not only because it's timely from a cultural point of view but it's also - and something that I favour quite a lot,= - it's the only reality show I've ever liked... It's very apt because in the program what happens is they get these assignments every week, they have these teams, and at the beginning of the show one team won five assignments in a row.
And then the sixth assignment the other team won, and they're like 'Finally we won one, what a relief. We're not complete losers'. And if you look at Xbox versus PlayStation, they've just been beating us and beating us and beating us and with online and Live we finally won one. We finally won an assignment so that's why we chose to do the online thing and we picked on ourselves, we had fun with it.
We know you're not talking about next-gen hardware, but can you at least confirm that you've made a final decision on the hardware, behind the scenes, on exactly what you're actually going to be doing?
Allard: Pretty much, yes. One thing that we think about as we move forward, one is going to be even more flexibility and more choice. I think consumers really want more choice, and there's got to be choice, and we have that flexibility in our plans. We're trying to... You know, think of it, the next generation. This is Xbox, it's the box for DirectX, we tried to take the best hardware we could find out there in the short period that we did to build the hardware manifestation of the DirectX platform.
The next generation is sort of the hardware manifestation of the XNA platform. Think of XNA as sort of the successor, if you will, to DirectX. That's how we're thinking about it, and when you think about it that way and you think about it being a software platform driving the hardware, it allows you to think about hardware a little differently. I think there'll be a couple of surprises... But, ah, we've made decisions; the team's locked.
Have you decided on the name as well?
Allard: The team is locked [laughs]! It's remarkable when you think about it. We were still signing contracts, we didn't have any publishers lined up at this point in time, you know last cycle. We're so far ahead from where we were last cycle this cycle. We really know what needs to be done and we have the lead time to do it really well; and if we do all the things and it all comes together and we're first to market, I think that will bode well for our success in the market.
