Anytime gamers get to pose questions to anyone on the Microsoft staff the Red Ring of Death will inevitably come up. Games Radar is pretty well known for their 10 questions feature. They round up someone in the gaming industry and users submit questions, from which Games Radar selects 10.
This time it was Shane Kim on the chopping block. For those who don’t know, Shane Kim is the Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Games Studio, aka the software side of the Microsoft’s gaming contribution.
The readers of Games Radar didn’t hesitate asking him hard hitting questions. Oh no! "What steps are you taking to ensure that the next iteration of Xbox isn’t rushed to market like the Xbox 360 was? Has Microsoft learned anything from the $1 billion write-off?"
Talk about bringing out the big guns. Mr Kim, a person who has absolutely nothing to do with the hardware side of Microsoft, answered the question like a politician, as expected. He dodged it at first by talking about how great MGS is and how there are 10 million Live users. After talking up the good stuff he did say, "we feel very confident in the quality of the consoles that we are producing, and our hardware experience and talent continue to grow."
Ok, so he didn’t say they learned lots on the hardware end, but that "continue to grow" thing at the end leads me to believe that they’re going to try really hard to prevent another RRoD issue from cropping up again.
He also briefly talks about the business model for the XNA games. "Later this summer we will provide full details on the business models for community games on Xbox LIVE, but I can tell you that we don’t expect them to compete with XBLA games." Hey, I said it was brief.
So there you go, ten questions with Shane Kim. What have we learned? First of all, software guys can’t answer hardware questions, but they will try. Secondly, if there’s money to be had Microsoft wants in on it so don’t expect the ‘youtube of games’ to be free.
