Microsoft Shane Kim Interview

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Microsoft's Shane Kim is one of the best placed men to be able to talk about Xbox 360.

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The Corporate VP for Microsoft's Xbox 360 arm graduated to the role after overseeing Microsoft Game Studios as boss, so he's seen the entire console war from more angles than most.

With Microsoft about to push into brave new territory with Project Natal, what does one of the key names as Microsoft see as being vital to its success? We asked Shane Kim, along with questions on Milo, the future of the 360 and what his favourite game is when we caught up with him at E3...



So how has E3 been? Is it fair to say that you won?
Well I think it's for others to judge whether we won or lost, but for us we feel it went brilliantly. We really feel that we made entertainment history on Monday: we unveiled the vision for the future, for controller free gaming and entertainment, with Project Natal. So far the reception has been overwhelming - we've been greatly humbled by that, and excited for the prospects. It's been really fun to be talking to people and doing interviews - we've just got so much good news to share.

To what extent is Natal the next step for gaming?
I think it's not just the next step for gaming, but really is going to revolutionise entertainment as a whole. That's why we had someone like Steven Spielberg on stage with us to unveil Project Natal - it was so important since we've had time to share Project Natal with third parties in our own industry, and that reception has been positive, but we've also been able to talk to people like Steven and others in the entertainment industry - broadly speaking. For someone like Steven to say "Hey, this has amazing potential. It could change the way we tell stories and interact with entertainment in general"...that's fantastic. I really do think that it can have a broad, far-reaching impact - not only on our industry, but on entertainment as a whole."

So where did Natal get its name from? Just how long has it been in development?

In general Microsoft uses cities for codenames, and Natal is a city in Brazil. One of our key development team members is from Brazil, but also Natal in latin means birth - and we felt that that also was very appropriate given that we're giving rise to a completely new category of entertainment - controller free gaming and entertainment. So the name really fit on a number of different dimensions.

It has been under development for quite some time, and the reason I say that is because being part of Microsoft really is a great competitive advantage for us - we have a massive amount of research and development going on in many different areas and we can take advantage of that. For example, in voice recognition (Natal's not just about gestures, even though that's obviously very complicated with full body skeletal recognition) we can take advantage of the voice recognition work that's been going on. Microsoft has had a longstanding investment in natural user interfaces, and so we're doing a lot of the work to bring all that stuff together in the first major consumer application that we think is going to have tremendous impact. So it's really taking advantage of the rest of the company's work, but the work we do will also be taken advantage of by other parts of the company as well.

Let's move on to young Milo. What came first the Milo project at Lionhead or Natal? Or were they both happening simultaneously?
Peter, I think, is one of the most brilliant and creative minds in our industry. He's been wanting to do this kind of a project, where you create this kind of interaction with this character - which is of course much better without the controller. You can be recognised facially, you can speak and be spoken to in a natural way rather than pick phrases on a controller... we're getting closer and closer to truly suspending disbelief. Then with the camera we're really able to interact directly - the blurring of the lines between Milo's world and our world are really profound, as you saw on the demo. So the integration of the Natal technology has let us take a great idea and has made it even better, because we're able to make you the controller now. That's pretty fascinating to watch.

Have you spoken to Milo then? What adventures did you get up to?
Peter doesn't let me get close to Milo! Y'know the guys at Lionhead are working so hard on this... the irony is that we're taking something that's super complex and we're trying to make it as simple as possible. So that any human being can go up and have a conversation with Milo - be able to go up and have Milo track your facial expressions and things like that. When I was running Microsoft Game Studios I had a lot of interaction with Milo, but since then Peter's been working to integrate Natal with Milo - I certainly have seen it, but Peter's doing most of the hands-on with it!

Another big move for 360 is to turn it into the complete home entertainment suite. When I saw it I thought it was like something out of Back to the Future II, with all the Twitter, the Facebook, the Sky TV...
We have a vision of making Xbox Live the next generation social and entertainment network. We're building on a base of gaming, of course, and Xbox Live has been a tremendous asset from a multiplayer gaming server standpoint - but we understand that for Microsoft we want to make Xbox the centre of home entertainment and Xbox Live really is a big key to that, as well as Project Natal, in the future. Every announcement that we made for Xbox Live at our briefing on Monday was about entertainment and social networking - nothing really to do with gaming. It was about Live Party, instant-on 1080p HD, Last fm, twitter, facebook... you can see how adding more to the breadth of content that's available on Xbox Live and expanding the social network that already is Xbox Live, connecting it to facebook and twitter so you can connect with all your friends, is all part of the long-term strategy and vision.

So how has the MS mindset evolved since the very first vision of the 360 console?

I would say that it's the growing realisation that we have an incredible asset with the Xbox business, both with Xbox 360 and Xbox Live. When we started most people thought of Xbox as a video-game console, and we focussed very much on establishing our credibility in the video-game space. We were coming in without any experience in consoles, and I think we did a really good job there. But now I think we're evolving the Xbox into something more than just a gaming franchise, into a real entertainment platform and service. That requires a very different kind of mentality and approach to our business - Xbox Live is a service that needs to run 24 hours a day, seven days a week. We are starting to deliver greater and greater programming there... I mean I don't live in the UK but I'm super-excited about the Sky deal. I think that watching live video over Xbox Live is going to be a better experience even if you have the same opportunity to watch that content on your televisions. We can surround it with a social entertainment experience that's not possible on any other platform. To be able to have live programming, that we don't have available in the US, is fantastic - because I'm a big sports guy and Sky has the rights to 80% of Premier League games and now you can watch them with your mates whether they're in the same room, or connected on Live. That's extremely powerful. That's going to be a signature experience that we're going to be able to hold up to content owners, service providers and people in all other countries. It's great that we're doing the groundbreaking work in the UK.

I'm hugely excited about the football. I have never had access to Sky, or stuff like pay per view before - so I'd imagine my girlfriend is going to end up fairly pissed off.
Can I ask a question? Why if you love the Premier league, which I guess is like the NFL for us, don't you get Sky dish? Is it just not available?

Well it's available, it's just costly. The way my parents brought me up was always "Oh, we don't need Sky Sports. We've already got four channels - there's no need for any more". There's a mentality that it's very much a luxury. And if it's a game you just go down the pub.
It all gets overshadowed a bit by the Natal news, but I really do think that a lot of the innovations we're bringing to Live, all of which will be this year, are a great path to the future. There's this amazing vision, with Natal, of what the future could hold - but you don't have to wait!

So would you say that you've now ticked all the boxes for what you wanted to achieve with the 360?
No. Because the generation isn't over, and we're not winning yet. Our goal is to win, always has been. We want to have hundreds of millions of customers, whether that's on 360 or on Live, and that's our vision. That's what Project Natal is about. Natal is not about responding to Nintendo and what they do with Wii, it goes well beyond what Nintendo and Sony are doing. This is about unlocking the potential and breaking down all the barriers that remain that prevent people who are intimidated or feel awkward with a controller in their hand - anything that prevents them from jumping in and having a great time with Xbox 360 and Xbox Live. That's what it's about. It's about the 60% of households around the world, more in some regions, that don't own a games console today. We only have so much to offer, so much value to offer: how do we prevent ourselves getting in the way? That's what Project Natal really is.

What would you say has been the Xbox 360's greatest success?
Xbox 360's greatest success has really been preserving yet evolving that core gaming base that we established with the original Xbox. We sold 25m original Xbox units in four years, which I think is very respectable for a company which didn't have any console experience. With the launch of Xbox 360 we've always had a vision to expand into broader entertainment, but we had to do that in a way that we made sure we carried forth our loyal core gaming base. I think we've done that, and now we're at 30m Xbox 360s in a little over three years around the world, we've grown the attach of Xbox Live, we have 20m members now, and we clearly are expanding the kinds of content and expanding the social network that's possible. I'm especially proud that we built a foundation, and that we really are building on that.

So where have been your biggest stumbling blocks?
Some of the challenges we've had on the hardware side are not a secret; it's the reason that Microsoft stepped up with an extended three year warranty, to ensure our customers would be protected. I think we've actually been able to ride through that very well. Because we did step up, that was a fairly expensive thing for us to do, but it was to preserve the integrity of the Xbox business and franchise. Clearly you would prefer not to do that, if we could have avoided that it would have been great, but I really do think we've done the best job possible to come through that that we could have.

What's your personal favourite game on the 360?

It's well known that I'm not a hardcore gamer, so with my family - we enjoy playing Rock Band together. We've always had a great experience with Rock Band. I'm looking forward to Beatles Rock Band - having Sir Paul and Ringo on stage at the conference... starting with them and ending with Steven Spielberg! What an amazing and entertaining show! But Rock Band has always been a favourite in our house.

Other than Beatles Rock Band, what's your most anticipated non-Natal 360 game then?
What looks a lot of fun to me, and I'm biased of course as it's a MS title, but I'm really interested in Joyride. They're very very creative guys, and they're very experienced from their time at EA, but I'm interested because it's simple to get into and uses your avatars in a fun way. And from a business standpoint I'm excited because it's going to test a new model, which is again only possible because we have Xbox Live. Free to play games and item-based transactions are obviously much more prevalent in Asia, but we really haven't seen it to a great degree in the West. With a property like Joyride, which is super-inviting and accessible to everyone, hopefully a lot of people can jump in... that's going to be the case for us.

OXM Staff