GI: I think you’ve had great success—especially with some of these first-party games. We were excited about Crackdown, no doubt. How do you plan to sell game to a broader audience outside the hardcore, which I think you’re fantastic at. Xbox Live screams to hardcore gamers. A lot of your titles from first party, save Viva Pinata, are definitely for the hardcore gamer crowd. What is Microsoft going to do to attract the larger, casual scene.
Moore: It’s a great question. You’ll be hearing a lot more about it in the next month or two. We have always had the focus on what we called—I don’t know whether I’ve sat down and talked about the first two holiday campaigns with you, but when we started building the strategy back in 2003, early 2004, we realized that the first 15 months, knowing what our ship date was even back then, would be critical to continue to recapture what’s called the hardcore gamer, and we want to make sure that we continue to have that sort of person on our side, because they’re very important to the overall ecosystem.
Then, coming into this holiday, we realized we needed to build an approachability story that was going to be important as we were attracting a different consumer in holiday 2007 and on to 2008. This is even before the Wii—the Wii was still the Revolution, and nobody knew anything about it. We recognized that both our strengths with Xbox became our Achilles’ heel with Xbox 360 in that we had built a very legitimate gaming device that had been taken to heart by the hardcore guys who when Microsoft announced the Xbox were very skeptical about our ability to deliver real gaming experiences on the console. I think we put all of that to rest very, very effectively and repositioned the brand. We went from black to white—it’s brighter and more optimistic brand. We’ve done an incredible amount of work with the third-party development community to make sure we’re well positioned to have all of the right content, the E and T content that’s going to be important in the out years in our platform. From a first-party point of view, it’s not just about E-rated games, it’s going to be about the experience that, quite frankly, Nintendo has done a tremendous job in capturing, in bringing back fun—if you will—to the gaming platforms. But we’ve got a few tricks up our sleeve as well to be able to do that. It’s not something that we’re going to be shy about, and it’s not something that we’re not painfully aware of that needs to be changed by this holiday. That has been the strategy all along, and we’ll be making some more announcements in the coming month or two. I think you’ll see how serious we are about that.
