Xbox 360 has certainly had a great deal of momentum this year and Microsoft is feeling its oats, proclaiming after the June NPD report that it would be number one worldwide at the end of the year. And that's not all - in a recent interview with IndustryGamers, Xbox CFO Dennis Durkin insisted that the first-party studio system at Microsoft Game Studios is actually "superior" to Sony or Nintendo.
Considering the wealth of IP that Nintendo has and the wide range of studios pumping out great content for the PlayStation business, that's a statement that many gamers may disagree with.
When we suggested to Durkin that Microsoft may need to build or acquire more studios to build up its development capabilities, he snapped back, "I would ask you to go and look at some of your data, just to compare first party performance over the course of this lifecycle, because I think our first party performance in terms of quality bars and units per title this shift has been superior to our competition’s."
"Our first party team really pushed our platform team to build a better platform."
Well unfortunately, we don't have access to that kind of raw data, nor will NPD Group be willing to divulge huge chunks of units data like that. From a quality perspective, that's somewhat subjective, but Metacritic shows an average of 75 for Microsoft Game Studios, 77 for Nintendo and 73 for SCEA (74 for SCEE and SCEI).
Durkin continued, "But certainly we think first party is an important tool and you can’t dispute titles like Forza, which has consistently come out on a repeated cadence and sold multi-million units. You can’t dispute things like Fable, which again, on a very consistent pace, has come out and sold 2 and 3 million units a pop. And now new titles, like Kinect Sports, which has come out and sold over 3 million units. So we are, not only building existing IP and incubating around titles like Halo and others, but really building new IP in new areas. And that’s going to be core to us... to build those experiences and monetize those."
Durkin noted that in a similar way that Halo drove the original Xbox and showed partners what the hardware could do, Microsoft Game Studios is now pushing forward with new Xbox experiences, especially on Kinect. "Our first party team really pushed our platform team to build a better platform," he said, adding about new experiences like UFC, "So a lot of those experiences, those new entertainment experiences, actually look a lot like gaming experiences in terms of how the functionality and the interactivity actually works. And we’re using that as a means of - all those content partners that I was talking about earlier - about making sure that they can see the vision of how content can be built and how interactive applications can be built inside of our network. And so first party has multiple roles in terms of our ecosystem, in terms of driving platform-exclusives, but also communicating to partners what’s important."
http://www.industrygamers.com/news/xbox-360-first-party-has-been-superior-to-ps3-wii-says-microsoft/
