Microsoft's Marc Whitten

You know what, I don't actually know off the top of my head. I will say from my perspective, Avatars have just been an amazing success, and one of the things that we've seen is something like 100 million changes of clothing since we launched Avatars in November. So it's something we see our audience doing a ton of. You do see that most people have their avatar picture as their Gamer Pic.

Well actually, what we're seeing is that as we add some of this richness, people have more ability to do things that are really interesting. Our Themes business fits within that as well, and as we launched the Themes for the New Xbox Experience that allows you to do special things behind the Friends channel, we've seen that business increases because people are really interested in the extra functionality. I believe now, as we launch things like Avatar Marketplace where we give people the ability to create content that they can award with their games, props and costumes, but also to create IP that they can put in the store, you will see that actually be bigger than we ever saw with Gamer Pics, because it's such a richer ecosystem and a richer way for people to express who they are.

Yeah, we're right in the middle of building out the last parts of how the tools work to sort of get the content in and ingest it, especially as you bring it in from third parties and give them the specs on the types of tools they need. But it's going very well. Certainly there is a range between an Avatar item and an Arcade game and beyond based on just the types of certification requirements, the types of things that we want to make sure we maintain a quality level and consistency. But our goal is that these things are very easy. The beauty of many of these things, especially things like Themes, things like personalisation around Avatar items, is that they are pure digital assets, which allows you to optimise a lot of the tools around this creation, ingestion and the content pipeline for that.

You mean like themes, and gamer pics?

I think about it in a slightly different way, and I would put it this way: the more you engage the community with the functionality that you build in and out of the game, I think it creates an overall opportunity. An example I'll give you is a game like Kingdom for Keflings. They did an amazing job of integration with Avatars. They integrated Avatars into their game, and it has been one of the best selling Arcade games because of that, because people like to use that. We see similar things with people that do a good job with functionality like Xbox Live Parties, or some of the different sorts of online functionality. Geometry Wars 2 is a good example, where they did such an amazing job of how they integrated the stats and Leaderboard functionality of Live that we believe that it drove significant additional revenue for them. It just became a much more viral hit.

The beauty of the New Xbox Experience to me is the ability to create new experiences that aren't actually consistent across the entire community or the entire world. Like the first time that the UK had a different set of channels and content than the US was with the New Xbox Experience. Also, this is the first time that you can change it consistently and over time. Something like Spotlight is a great example, where everybody sees that when they first pop on. It's a great experience. But frankly what we've seen is that people do an awful lot of exploring of the New Xbox Experience in a pretty rich way pretty consistently. So it kind of serves as a very advanced website, and you see people tracking us. We put interesting content up there, interesting games, interesting things like Inside Xbox. We see a lot of people who just go check out that content.

I actually think it's going to be an amazing year for the Summer of Arcade. And the truth of the matter is that at the time we were talking about it last year, everybody didn't know whether Braid was going to be as good as it was. I think those games [for 2009] are amazing. Shadow Complex will be one of the biggest games ever. I don't mean biggest in size, but biggest in terms of quality, depth, story, that we've ever seen. Marvel Vs Capcom, is another one a lot of people have been asking about. So I'm actually really excited about that line-up.

The other thing I'll tell you is what I've seen, and what makes me really excited about Xbox Live Arcade is that the size of that business has continued to grow, and what's exciting about that to me is, my success is just 100 per cent derived from the fact that people are being economically successful on that service, that you can put out games out there, that they find an audience. And I love to see that that pie is growing, because I think it's brought in an entire new generation and an entire new category of developers and content into this world.