Dean Takahashi of Mercury News has finally got round to transcribing an interesting-ish interview with Bill Gates, recorded during CES. The Microsoft figurehead was in bullish mood, firing out quotes like Windows error messages. Sure, a lot of it was about IPTV, but there were some decent videogame bits. Here is his assessment of the competition:
"Sony has always been our most direct competitor. Nintendo of course is a competitor. But look at the resolution you get with a controlled experience like that. Say to yourself, how in terms of using a game for a long period of time, what kind of accuracy and capability do you want? Look at the classic Nintendo positioning. Look at the graphics. Look at Nintendo's execution in terms of online capability. We have this thing that nobody has ever seen before. When you say to your friend, hey let's play online, you say then you have to buy an Xbox."
I'm not sure I'm ever likely to say to myself, "how in terms of using a game for a long period of time, what kind of accuracy and capability do you want?" because it's a grammatical apocalypse, but I understand what he's getting at - does Wii provide a long-term experience, or is it just a novelty that everyone loved for five minutes until their arms got tired? I have friends who've already shelved theirs...
Anyway, Gates wasn't finished there. Here he is on the PS3 hardware. Beware, this is almost Pinter-esque in its employment of scatter gun non-sequiturs...
"They were going to have the Cell be the video processor. But they didn't know what they were doing. They said the Cell is the video processor. But they turned to Nvidia at the last minute, but Nvidia can't do embedded DRAM. Go look at the bandwidth problems. Go ask the guys running ... now. They took their year and burned it by not having a decent CPU strategy and then turning to Nvidia at the last minute. It's a very unusual thing. Those processors are isolated from each other. You are seeing great game developers. Things will get better on us and on them. We think they're get better on us. That is so close. We claim we're better. It doesn't matter. It's just like pointing at the Xbox 1. We were 20 percent better. But it didn't matter. We were a year late, didn't have the best games. We had this bigger box. We did have online. We didn't switch positions on that."
Meanwhile, Microsoft's Chris Satchell has told Gamesindustry.biz that over half of those who've bought Xbox 360 did not previously own an Xbox.
"So there are lots of new people coming in, which kind of surprises you. What we're actually finding is that our customer set is broadening, which we think is important."
So Microsoft believes broadening the customer base is important?! So that's how they've become so successful...
Anyway, it's an interesting revelation, which would seem to add credence to Gates' assertion that new people are coming to 360 simply to discover online gaming - they're not all geeky day-one Xbox fanatics.
Talking about online gaming with Xbox 360, veteran casual game publisher Popcap has just launched an Xbox Live Arcade version of its unapologetically old skool side-scrolling shooter, Heavy Weapon. The game is an attempt to re-live the glory days of co-op blasters like Ikari Warriors, and the Xbox 360 version features four-player online action as well as 19 single-player missions. It's, quite literally, a blast.
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