Venture Beat interview with Phil Harrison
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On Game Development said:GamesBeat: Is there a big increase in the staffing here? I think Phil mentioned that there are more games in the works than ever before — 15 big games coming and eight completely new ones. That sounds like a pretty big investment. I don’t know if it’s caused the organization to get bigger or if there were comparisons to 10 years ago.
Harrison: I don’t know the numbers off the top of my head, but I know that IEB has grown every year for the last few years. We’ve made a substantial investment in our hardware team and a substantial investment in our platform teams to allow the innovations that you saw today. From a studios perspective, we are investing, I believe, a billion dollars for content development just for games, which is more than we’ve ever spent in our history. We’re starting new studios. We’ve started studios in London [and] in Los Angeles. We’re growing our organization. This is a fantastic opportunity. It takes a lot of people.
On Kinect said:GamesBeat: Based on what’s in the works for Kinect, will games go in a direction that they haven’t gone before?
Harrison: The fundamental, most impactful thing is that there’s a Kinect in every box now. There’s the ubiquity of the platform having Kinect whereas before it was always a subset. That made it difficult for developers to invest against 20 percent of the installed base or whatever it was.
Having it as 100 percent — that’s a game-changer. There are games that are not using motion but using voice in a very subtle way. The conversational understanding in Kinect for Xbox One is super sensitive and smart. It allows us to do some subtle things with voice that we couldn’t do on 360. You’ll see that at E3 [Electronic Entertainment Expo]. I’ll point them out to you.
We have a couple of cool examples of that where — even though your game is a fundamentally controller-based experience — the voice becomes this augmented menu system. Previously, you’d have to go down N number of menu trees to get to a particular feature. Now you can just say it. That’s pretty cool.
And then movement can be subtle. While you’re playing the game, it could be just doing some very gentle movements that [Kinect] can pick up and then amplify in the world.
On Used Games said:GamesBeat: There’s been a lot of chatter on particular controversial subjects leading up to this. People want to know about used games, about backward compatibility, and about the constant connection. What are some of the facts on those? Can you play used games on the Xbox One? Do you have to pay a fee?
Harrison: Just like today, if you have a game disc that you buy from the store, you can play that game. The game is now installed to the hard drive. Any user who is associated with that Xbox One can play that game. I can give that game disc to my son and he can go and take it to another machine inside the house and play it on that machine. Just like today, only one of us can play it at any one time.
The difference, though — the benefit of Xbox One is that that data can roam with me. I can go to my friend’s house. I can log in as myself into his machine. I can then play that game on his machine, and while I’m logged in, he can play it as well.
GamesBeat: Do you bring your disc with you, or could you use his disc?
Harrison: Doesn’t matter, yeah. If I bring my disc with me and I leave the bits on his hard drive, but he wants to play the game, he can buy the game — just like today. But in this instance, the bits were already on his hard drive, so it’s an instant switch-out. We will have a solution — and we’re not talking about the details today but just to take the angst out of this — that allows a user to trade that game back in and to give up the right to play that game.
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