Microsoft's Marc Whitten

We are constantly improving both the type of content experiences as well as the architecture and the performance, both on the server side as well as on the console side. So the next release is coming in August that brings a lot of the stuff like the Games on Demand, Avatar Marketplace, Avatar rewardables. And you'll continue to see us adding on to that with many of the other experiences coming in the fall. We're hard at work on a long roadmap of stuff over the next year. Now, I think you might be specifically asking about completely re-doing the user interface?

It could possibly happen in that part of the value of this generation is how with something like Xbox Live and the power of the console, you can reinvent the experience and continue to grow the experience. What I'll tell you is right now, the New Xbox Experience has been incredibly successful. It's given us the ability to expand faster, to innovate faster, to target things. The fact that we're launching a new category, a new channel like the Music Channel, is because we have the ability of the New Xbox Experience to expand to give us this place that we can do that work. So right now it's just super great. We're very excited by how it's worked.

I think we don't share a ton of details on how long we did it. Since we launched the Xbox we've constantly had a software team in my organisation that is focused on building these platform experiences and driving this work. What I saw when we started really thinking about the New Xbox Experience was a couple of things. The first thing was, you would go and talk to people, and many people who owned the Xbox 360 didn't understand how much stuff that the console could do. And when you explained it to them, their satisfaction with the console, the excitement, the time they wanted to use it just went up. And I just thought, wow, how crazy is it that all of this stuff is there, and we can't share it with people? That's such a mess.

The second thing was, it became a little tough to add any functionality. And so as a result we were getting deeper and deeper and deeper nested menus and things like that. And so in terms of usability and a speed of innovation perspective, we were finding that we just didn't have the ability to move as fast as we or our community wanted. And so we spent a lot of time really re-thinking the experience from a different perspective.

We've had 1 Vs. 100, which just shipped this week, which I think is an amazing social experience. And there were games like A Kingdom for Keflings, so we've had some experimentation early on. The truth of the matter is as we get the tools out there, it takes a while for the development community to be able to ingest that, figure out how to design around it and start bringing games to market. What I think you see this year is that more and more of that content is starting to really feature Avatars in rich ways. Now it's everything from the Dashboard itself, where you see things like the shared viewing experiences, and then Last.fm or Sky or Zune or Facebook having more of the Avatar stuff, to new games like Joy Ride and 1 Vs 100 where we're really featuring those.

And we're seeing more and more interest in really using those Avatars in a rich way. One of these I'm excited about is that I actually think you're going to see our Avatars in a huge wealth of offerings, like much more than I think you see anywhere else in terms of being able to use that idea in different places.

No, actually. We have a set of APIs obviously to allow them to get to that, and we have some constraints.

Correct. We like to keep it in good clean fun. And we sort of just share those out, and then we're happy to talk with them if they are interested in sharing some ideas. But we're very encouraging. We believe this is a platform feature in the same way that stats, Leaderboards, matchmaking and the rest of our community system is. And frankly what I love is seeing people do things that we hadn't thought about that really sort of push the envelope. So we're not trying to be like, oh, this is a Microsoft thing. It's very open.

Yes. Because they don't have to submit to us to ask us may I please use your Avatars. What we're starting to see is more and more interest as they develop those experiences, and we've seen many things both in what we're sharing as well as others that are still under development that we think people are really going to like.

That's right. And you'll also see us adding new functionality, things from community request. Things like the rewardables, the ability for games to reward items is directly based on both developer and publisher ecosystem as well as what the community wants to do with that.

What I think has been really cool is that the overall digital distribution on Live has created a bunch of that opportunity, both in terms of the games as well as the add-ons. I think you're seeing more and more interest from that. My history, and I've been on Xbox and Xbox Live for a long time, is that I feel like there were years where we were pushing rope, where it was like come on, I promise digital distribution and this add-on stuff is going to be big. And what's kind of nice is like, you've definitely gotten to the downslope, and you see it both in terms of people being really interested in consuming it as well as people being interested in doing the stuff. I think it's pretty cool.

No. Frankly I decided to solve it in another way, which was to redo the user interface and make it work well. I'm a huge believer in the longtail effect. Part of what excites me about the games marketplace stuff is a title like Civilization Revolution. I love Civilization Revolution. It was a great MetaCritic game. It did OK at retail, but it didn't do great. Now it's actually hard to find. So I love the fact that now by putting it into retail Games On Demand, I can create this longtail where someone coming in new can get this great content.

Right now we're just talking about the portfolio of games that we have at launch, and the fact that we update those on a weekly basis. But I continue to believe that digital distribution as an evolving area is going to continue to evolve in a whole bunch of different ways, in terms of what types of things are people doing with add-ons, how people distribute games, and I think we'll continue to evolve.