Xbox In Transition

RW: Quite a few people left the Xbox division before Xbox 360 came out, such as Blackley and Ed Fries. How did these losses affect the company? Was there ever a point where the future of the Xbox project was in doubt?

DT: No, I never got that sense from people; Microsoft always seemed gung ho about the project. It goes back to that pivotal meeting with Bill Gates in 2000, the "St. Valentines Day Massacre" as they called it. Once that meeting was over, Microsoft was committed to the Xbox for the next 15 to 20 years. Microsoft never got the hardware costs down for the original Xbox the way the company had hoped, but they sold 25 million consoles and created a blockbuster franchise with Halo and Halo 2. They had some great results in 2004, too, when the Xbox at one point actually outsold the PlayStation 2. However, I do think that some of the original team members who left did so because they didn't see the light at the end of the tunnel for the Xbox, and didn't have confidence in the mothership and its strategy for the console.

RW: One area where Microsoft has clearly struggled on both consoles is game development. How has Microsoft's approach to producing games for the Xbox changed since the first console?

DT: I think Microsoft has gone through a couple of major strategy changes for game development since the Xbox project started. The first strategy was to try to get a lot of new, original titles for the console, and get as many games as they could on the Xbox platform to compete with the other console makers. But that didn't quite work out. The current strategy is a less-is-more approach: make fewer games but put a focus on quality, "triple A" titles - that strategy takes time, though.

Look at the segment of the book that deals with Halo 2; there was a huge battle over that title. A lot of people wanted to rush the game out the door before it was ready, but others like Ed Fries wanted to give the developers more time to make a truly great game. That said, I still think the Xbox team needs to work on adding more in-house game developers and third-party game developers, because Microsoft needs to compete with all the soldiers that Nintendo and Sony have.