Xbox Q&a With Ms Rep From Gs

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We grill the director of the Xbox content services team about Xbox Live's launch and its future.

Now that Microsoft has taken the Xbox online with the recent launch of Xbox Live, we've checked in with the Xbox Live team to see where the service is going to evolve from here. We had a chance to talk with Cameron Ferroni, a 10-year Microsoft veteran who has worked on the Xbox project since 1999, when the Xbox Live team was first being formed. In the years that have followed, he has managed the teams that work with developers and publishers to secure content for the system. In our brief chat, we grilled him on Xbox Live's present and future.

GameSpot: First, tell us how the Xbox Live launch has gone.

Cameron Ferroni: We don't have specific sales yet, but in terms of overall response it's been great. We know most of the retailers are already sold out. Replenishments are on their way, and some have gotten them already. We have a strong replenishment strategy throughout the holiday, so we feel good about there being units on shelves from now until the holiday for sure. We've also seen some anecdotal evidence of the Xbox Live titles themselves, beyond the starter kits, really picking up in sales. If you walk into a lot of stores you won't see Live games because they're flying off the shelves. So retail's been really solid, we've got some rough numbers around the service usage, and the numbers are looking good. We're totally in line with our expectations.

GS: What were the expectations for Xbox Live?

CF: We said we wanted to get over 100,000 users by this holiday, and we're totally on track for that.

GS: Do you think that limited access to broadband may affect sales?

CF: You know, we haven't seen that. Certainly we've looked at the Sony situation, and they've made a big deal about the difference in narrow and broadband sales. Then we looked at the title they pushed the most, SOCOM, and that's broadband only. What we've seen is that with the early demographic, with the hard-core gamers, you know a lot of them have broadband already. We've actually started to see that a number of our broadband partners are looking at doing offers that are showing people how to get broadband just to hook up to their Xbox even if they don't hook it up to their PC. So we're starting to see that early momentum that we expected, which is that if you offer a compelling service and the people that have broadband are in great shape and the people that want it will get it and we're going to create demand for it, so we actually think we're in great shape there.

GS: So what can you tell me about banning Xbox owners from Live if they have mod chips installed?

CF: Well, let me walk you through it. First, our terms of use for modded boxes were very clear for Xbox Live right from day one. We said we had the right to ban boxes and user accounts if we detect that the box has been modified, so we're basically starting to exercise our rights in that. It's all about preventing cheating and hacking and preserving the integrity of the experience, right? One of the biggest issues people have with online gaming services is when 10 percent of the community starts to cheat, and 80 percent of the community stops playing. That's a stat we've seen through history on the big online gaming sites, and everybody responds to cheating in aggressive ways.

One of the ways we can do that is to prevent boxes which are at risk for creating cheating attempts or hacking attempts from ever getting onto the service in the first place. Gamers love it--98 percent of the posts on message boards are from people saying "this is great." That is why we did it. The gamers demanded that they get a safe integral experience, and that's something we can do with a service. If it was just one-off games, we'd never be able to do that.

GS: Some users have been having trouble with games like Unreal Championship because of bandwidth issues. How is Microsoft attempting to ensure that Xbox Live users get the best experience?

CF: Well, there's really three classes of game issues that people are running into that has very little to do with the Xbox Live service and more to do with the realities of networking. I'll give you a sense of how we categorize those and think about dealing with them. The first is, as you say, if I have a cable modem at home I'm not going to host a 16-player Unreal session. The upstream bandwidth just isn't there to make that happen. Now that doesn't mean I can't join one or can't go out and find a session that has 16 players in it and participate, which is what a lot of people are doing in that situation.

Now that would be step one. Step two is within the game itself. We've worked really closely to ensure that they set realistic limits once they detect your bandwidth and say, "Look, you'll be able to safely host X amount of players in a session." If you want to push it further and try it, we don't tell you what to do. You can absolutely do that, but then we'll warn people on the flip side when they're joining the session: "Hey, this person's pushed their limits pretty hard. If you join that session you may not have the best experience." That's just a reality of the fact that if you've only got 64k upstream, there's only so much data you can push down the pipe.

So that's one category of issues we've seen. The second category of issues we've seen has to do with gamers behind routers. A big piece of the stuff behind routers, and this has been a problem in PC gaming forever, is that if I'm behind a router and you're behind a router, there's a variety of problems that can come up. Being able to play head-to-head will depend on how our routers are configured, if there's a server in the clear that we're talking to, etc. So a number of the problems and little sorts of weird behaviors people are seeing on the service right now are situations where two or more players in the sessions are behind routers and they're getting unpredictable behavior behind them. What we've done to address that, and we're going to start pointing people at this, is a full-on router compatibility list on our Web site, and we actually list all of the major routers and talk about what you can do with your specific router's configuration settings to make it a better experience for Xbox Live. So we've worked with all the providers to get all of the information, and again it's all part of the service, which is getting that data out to customers to help their experience.

GS: Are there any plans to increase the number of servers you'll be running?

CF: We're just looking at that on a case-by-case basis. We are running a handful of Unreal Championship servers right now, and they tend to be fairly popular. That said, I went on last night and played on some games individuals were hosting and had a great experience on those as well. So we're looking at it to sort of see what the demand is and how do the users themselves create the sessions and create good sessions to the point where we maybe don't need to run them as much because there are lots of other great servers out there. So we tried to put them out there as a test to see if they work and how many we need.

GS: If this does work out well, do youexpect we'll see more servers in the future?

CF: We could., I think it has a lot do with the way the user community gets involved. If you look at the PC side of the house, the primary servers people use--with the exception of MMP games--are servers hosted by users, right? A guy that works at an ISP puts a big server up because he wants to be the cool server master. So there's a certain element of pride that the users take in terms of creating and hosting sessions, and we want to see how that evolves. In an ideal world we'd be able to totally rely on the user community to do that, and the way we think about it, for the most part, is that we put the Unreal ones up to bootstrap the process., On the first few days it wasn't clear if there were going to be enough people out there hosting sessions people were going to feel good about, but over time it should evolve into a steady state where you do have that, so we look at it and as we think about new games coming online we think about the same things.

GS: Tell me about how Xbox Live is going to evolve.

CF: The hard part for me is getting specific. We look at it and we look at what we've done through the first weekend, and we're already starting to get the "man I wish..." thoughts, right? "I wish that the games did this" or "I wish that the games did that." We've probably got 150 things we'd like to see just in terms of tweaks and improvements to offer a better user experience in the game. But before we start adding new features, we'd like to improve what's there. For example, stuff like "I wish the games made it easier for me to tell who's talking." I mean it's taking a feature we already have, which is voice, and improving it because it's tough to tell who's talking in a 16-player game.

So there are 150 things like that, and then there's the next wave of features that everybody's talking about--things like offline messaging, tournaments, clans, being able to share content with other users, and so on. So there's a category of features that are new features in the games and outside the games. We're really just in the planning phases on that, right? Now that we have made it through launch we're looking at our schedule for next year and looking at the most popular features and making the determination of what we're going to implement.

The third place we've had really strong demand for is building a community aspect around the service. Offline messaging is a good example of something that would tie into that, which is "why can't I get a message to my PC when my buddies go online telling me they're online and to come play Xbox with them?" Checking your stats from your PC to see your rankings to help you decide how much you'll want to play when you go home. So those are the three categories of things we're thinking of next year to help create a sense of community.

GS: Are these long-term or short-term goals for the service?

CF: Well, it will vary. I think that's part of running a service, you know? Part of running a service is reacting to problems, monitoring forums, and looking at what people want so we know the improvements we can make to be responsive, which is critical to us. It's not like you finish a game and put it on the shelf and you're done or on a network server and you ignore it forever and go start working on the next thing. A big part of what we've built with Xbox Live is a commitment to our customer base, and we've got to be responsive, and we've got to be working with them. That's one of our key differentiators right now.

GS: Thanks for your time, Cameron.

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