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Microsoft's Marc Whitten

The Xbox Live general manager discusses the evolution of NXE, new business opportunities and revenue streams for developers on XBLA

GamesIndustry.biz Tell me about the development process of a Dashboard update. Are you already working on a major update? Do you plan that far ahead, or do you think you're solid on the current one for the remainder of the console's life cycle?
Marc Whitten

We are constantly improving both the type of content experiences as well as the architecture and the performance, both on the server side as well as on the console side. So the next release is coming in August that brings a lot of the stuff like the Games on Demand, Avatar Marketplace, Avatar rewardables. And you'll continue to see us adding on to that with many of the other experiences coming in the fall. We're hard at work on a long roadmap of stuff over the next year. Now, I think you might be specifically asking about completely re-doing the user interface?

GamesIndustry.biz Is that something that could possibly happen? Is that something you experiment with early on?
Marc Whitten

It could possibly happen in that part of the value of this generation is how with something like Xbox Live and the power of the console, you can reinvent the experience and continue to grow the experience. What I'll tell you is right now, the New Xbox Experience has been incredibly successful. It's given us the ability to expand faster, to innovate faster, to target things. The fact that we're launching a new category, a new channel like the Music Channel, is because we have the ability of the New Xbox Experience to expand to give us this place that we can do that work. So right now it's just super great. We're very excited by how it's worked.

GamesIndustry.biz So for the current UI, the New Xbox Experience, what was the development time like? When and why did you recognise a need for it?
Marc Whitten

I think we don't share a ton of details on how long we did it. Since we launched the Xbox we've constantly had a software team in my organisation that is focused on building these platform experiences and driving this work. What I saw when we started really thinking about the New Xbox Experience was a couple of things. The first thing was, you would go and talk to people, and many people who owned the Xbox 360 didn't understand how much stuff that the console could do. And when you explained it to them, their satisfaction with the console, the excitement, the time they wanted to use it just went up. And I just thought, wow, how crazy is it that all of this stuff is there, and we can't share it with people? That's such a mess.

The second thing was, it became a little tough to add any functionality. And so as a result we were getting deeper and deeper and deeper nested menus and things like that. And so in terms of usability and a speed of innovation perspective, we were finding that we just didn't have the ability to move as fast as we or our community wanted. And so we spent a lot of time really re-thinking the experience from a different perspective.

GamesIndustry.biz My personal feeling, and I don't know if you'll agree with this, is that there really hasn't been much done with the Avatars yet. Would you disagree with that?
Marc Whitten

We've had 1 Vs. 100, which just shipped this week, which I think is an amazing social experience. And there were games like A Kingdom for Keflings, so we've had some experimentation early on. The truth of the matter is as we get the tools out there, it takes a while for the development community to be able to ingest that, figure out how to design around it and start bringing games to market. What I think you see this year is that more and more of that content is starting to really feature Avatars in rich ways. Now it's everything from the Dashboard itself, where you see things like the shared viewing experiences, and then Last.fm or Sky or Zune or Facebook having more of the Avatar stuff, to new games like Joy Ride and 1 Vs 100 where we're really featuring those.

And we're seeing more and more interest in really using those Avatars in a rich way. One of these I'm excited about is that I actually think you're going to see our Avatars in a huge wealth of offerings, like much more than I think you see anywhere else in terms of being able to use that idea in different places.

GamesIndustry.biz What is the process like for a third party wanting to integrate Avatars? Is there a submission process where you determine if a game is good enough for Avatars?
Marc Whitten

No, actually. We have a set of APIs obviously to allow them to get to that, and we have some constraints.

GamesIndustry.biz Like they can't decapitate them horribly?
Marc Whitten

Correct. We like to keep it in good clean fun. And we sort of just share those out, and then we're happy to talk with them if they are interested in sharing some ideas. But we're very encouraging. We believe this is a platform feature in the same way that stats, Leaderboards, matchmaking and the rest of our community system is. And frankly what I love is seeing people do things that we hadn't thought about that really sort of push the envelope. So we're not trying to be like, oh, this is a Microsoft thing. It's very open.

GamesIndustry.biz Have you been getting a lot of submissions using the Avatars?
Marc Whitten

Yes. Because they don't have to submit to us to ask us may I please use your Avatars. What we're starting to see is more and more interest as they develop those experiences, and we've seen many things both in what we're sharing as well as others that are still under development that we think people are really going to like.

GamesIndustry.biz So the APIs are included in your development kit automatically, and a developer can submit a game using Avatars for approval like any other game?
Marc Whitten

That's right. And you'll also see us adding new functionality, things from community request. Things like the rewardables, the ability for games to reward items is directly based on both developer and publisher ecosystem as well as what the community wants to do with that.

GamesIndustry.biz So you would say third parties are making real money off of this stuff, and it's worth their time?
Marc Whitten

What I think has been really cool is that the overall digital distribution on Live has created a bunch of that opportunity, both in terms of the games as well as the add-ons. I think you're seeing more and more interest from that. My history, and I've been on Xbox and Xbox Live for a long time, is that I feel like there were years where we were pushing rope, where it was like come on, I promise digital distribution and this add-on stuff is going to be big. And what's kind of nice is like, you've definitely gotten to the downslope, and you see it both in terms of people being really interested in consuming it as well as people being interested in doing the stuff. I think it's pretty cool.

GamesIndustry.biz I remember you discussing I believe last year the delisting policies for Live Arcade games, but has anything actually been delisted yet?
Marc Whitten

No. Frankly I decided to solve it in another way, which was to redo the user interface and make it work well. I'm a huge believer in the longtail effect. Part of what excites me about the games marketplace stuff is a title like Civilization Revolution. I love Civilization Revolution. It was a great MetaCritic game. It did OK at retail, but it didn't do great. Now it's actually hard to find. So I love the fact that now by putting it into retail Games On Demand, I can create this longtail where someone coming in new can get this great content.

GamesIndustry.biz On the subject of Games On Demand, obviously it makes sense to feature games like Civilization Revolution to create this longtail effect, but does it make any sense for new games? Could games be available online day-and-date?
Marc Whitten

Right now we're just talking about the portfolio of games that we have at launch, and the fact that we update those on a weekly basis. But I continue to believe that digital distribution as an evolving area is going to continue to evolve in a whole bunch of different ways, in terms of what types of things are people doing with add-ons, how people distribute games, and I think we'll continue to evolve.

Marc Whitten is general manager of Xbox Live. Interview by Frank Cifaldi.