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Interview: Microsoft's Scott Henson
-- March 27, 2006 by: Chris Remo
Microsoft may not have delivered a keynote address at last week's Game Developers Conference in GDC, but that didn't mean the company wasn't present at the show. GDC isn't really about the consumer announcements, it's about bringing developers together and enabling the creation of better games. To that end, Microsoft was there connecting with developers and showing off its new XNA initiative. I sat down with Scott Henson, product unit manager for the company's game technology group, to hear about Microsoft's GDC goals and ask a few questions about upcoming plans.
Microsoft has a big stake in games on multiple platforms, with Windows gaming, Xbox gaming, and casual gaming--which now itself extends to Windows, Xbox, and mobile platforms. It currently aims to bring all three together from a development perspective with a development environment called XNA. Henson went through each of the three gaming platforms in which Microsoft operates and outlined the company's current perspectives.
Windows
"There are hundreds of millions of copies of Windows out there, and what's interesting about that from a gamer perspective is how big that audience is who are playing games," Henson said. "When we've gone and done research on this, the feedback we've gotten is that about half of the folks out there identify themselves as gamers. That's a really, really big audience of gamers out there." He also noted that online gaming specifically is growing at a huge rate, with some projections indicating that, five years from now, online Windows gaming could see yearly revenue of $6.8 billion. In terms of the total gaming audience, Henson said that about 80 million people play Microsoft's packed in games such as Solitaire and Minesweeper at least monthly. (For the record, I might personally have a decade-long Minesweeper addiction.) He claimed that this "is really kind of interesting when you think about some of the titles we're putting into Vista and some of the integration with the game explorer we're doing in Vista." Windows Vista, the consumer version of which was recently delayed until 2007, aims to simplify and centralize the organization of games on the PC, which will in turn hopefully bring in new audiences who were previously intimidated by the complexity of installing and maintaining games on the PC.
Console
"We're still on track for our four and a half to five and a half million [Xbox 360 units shipped by June]," Henson assured me. The quoted figure is Microsoft's most recent shipment estimate, a revision of the initial goal of having three million units shipped by the end of February. And when will we be able to actually go into a store and pick up an Xbox 360 hassle-free? "Soon," he laughed. "We've upped our overall production capacity and influx two to three times what it was previously. We're well on track." By that same time frame, the system will have about eighty titles released, with fifty retail games and thirty on Xbox Live Arcade.
Casual
Microsoft first introduced its Internet Gaming Zone almost 10 years ago. Now called MSN Games, it servers over 30 million users, 9 million of whom play games on the service at least monthly. Another 16 million users play casual games through MSN Messenger. Of course, many of those games are now playable through Xbox Live Arcade, which has seen a surprising degree of success. While Henson estimates that, with web-based and cell phone casual games, about 1-2% of users who play a game's free trial end up actually purchasing game, that trial to purchase conversion rate is an astonishing 20% on Xbox Live Arcade. "We're seeing an incredible pickup on people actually buying the games," he said. "It's a really interesting metric, because it's an order of magnitude greater." That of course says a lot about the potential for casual games even among the core gaming audience.
XNA
(This section refers to the development tools Microsoft was showing off at GDC. If you'd prefer to skip straight to the interview section of this article, feel free to turn the page now.)
First unveiled two years ago at GDC, XNA is a suite of Microsoft's software development environment, targeted specifically at games. It unifies the development environments of Xbox and Windows, making it easier and faster for developers to work on games across multiple platforms (well, Windows platforms). Despite the original announcement two years ago, there has been little practical news regarding XNA, but at GDC Microsoft gave an XNA preview disc to every attendee at the conference.
"We went out and started talking to the industry," Henson explained, "and we asked them, 'Hey, what's the biggest pain point that you have?' Universally, they came back and said, 'Our build processes are broken, they're archaic, it's just hard to make games. We sit on our hands, our artists are wasting time, please help us with our build process.' So we've created a custom version of [Microsoft's software build platform] MSBuild that we call XNA Build that's tailor made for games." An early version of that is what's on the preview disc. As a learning tool, it also includes the full source code and assets from Microsoft Game Studios' 2001 title MechCommander 2. For those interested, it's all available from Microsoft's XNA website.To demonstrate what can be done with XNA, Henson showed me a couple small game demos. First up was a version of the traditional game Mahjong. The game's author originally wrote the game for cell phones using Microsoft's C# language, and with XNA was able to get it running on Windows with the Xbox 360 within a day with "100% code reuse." He was then apparently able to port it to Xbox 360 without a developer kit, starting one morning and finishing by the afternoon. In a few more days, an artist and a shader programmer added a bevy of visual effects to make the game more on par with other 360 casual games; the improved 360 game was then able to be rebuilt instantly to run on Windows.
Henson also showed an example relating to higher end game development. "We think there are some really interesting prototyping opportunities here too," he said. He demonstrated a prototype of a life simulation game, in which the player drops seeds onto a green planet, resulting in flowers sprouting. By placing the seeds in strategic locations, the flowers cross-pollinate and new types of plants grow, leading to more chain reactions. "The point is, they were able to get something up really quickly and start playing with these game ideas," he said. The prototype was created in C# within a couple weeks. The game's programmer, a developer from the Age of Empires team, had never used C# before.
(Turn the page for some questions regarding reactions to recent events and future plans.)
