Moore on 360
E3 may still be days away, but Microsoft is already hitting headlines with some important announcements. First came the news that the Xbox 360 warranty is to be extended following complaints from consumers. It was swiftly followed by the revelation that the company has just failed to meet its shipment target of 12 million units.
Immediately following the announcements, Xbox boss Peter Moore spoke exclusively to GamesIndustry.biz about what's causing the 360's problems, why Microsoft is prepared to pay the cost and why he believes shipments will rise.
GamesIndustry.biz: Has Microsoft added a second heatsink inside the Xbox 360?Peter Moore: So you're already into the questions I'm not going to answer? [Laughs]
I figured we'd start from there...It's a myriad of things. There are a lot of different issues that eventually could all combine to create the three flashing red rings that appear on the power button on the console; no specific issue.
As you probably know, companies like ourselves that do hardware are constantly updating and tweaking and making sure that we're taking costs out of the box and improving the quality.
We learn a lot when we have as many as we have now in the field around the world, so we're possibly doing things to improve the performance as well as to take costs out of it - so it's not one particular issue.
Was there a certain percentage [of defects] you found unacceptable? Obviously it was enough that you took notice and did something, but are you going to say anything further?No, I'm not putting a metric on it. It's difficult to put a metric on it, but quite frankly, when we say it is unacceptable, it is unacceptable. And that's our metric.
So, you know, over the past few weeks and months we've been seeing enough information and gathering information... This is not something we just decided to do on Monday.
We wanted to make sure we gathered the right amount of data. We made sure that we could put fixes in, plus equally importantly, made sure that we gathered all of the costs.
As you can see, it is not an inconsequential amount of money. And so, you need to make sure you do it once and you do it right. You don't want to keep coming back every quarter saying 'Oh, there's more money that we didn't identify' so we're making sure we're covering all of the costs as well as covering any costs we're about to incur.
Obviously, we're retroactively reimbursing anybody that we charged to fix the box. It's the right thing to do, and as I said in my letter, I really apologise to anybody that we put through this whole thing.
I was just trying to figure out, is a 10 per cent failure rate acceptable? 15 per cent?You know it when you see it. We saw it, and it was unacceptable, and we got after it.
Do you have anything to say about target figures, as far as hardware goes?From a sales point of view, we did announce today that we had hit 11.6 million sold. A little shy... We had said that we'd hit 12 [million], and that's kind of about 12, but a little shy.
On the state of the business, we feel really good about that. A lot of what we're going to talk about at E3 next week is about the games line-up, and we feel really good about our line-up, both first party and third party and what we've got to offer this holiday.
It is going to be a tremendous holiday. Hopefully, people will recognise and respect what we've done. It's difficult, but it's the right thing to do, and then turn their attention on the holiday.
I should be very interested to get up tomorrow morning and see what the lads back in the UK have to say. I'm hoping they'll realise we're trying to do the right thing.
Peter Moore is corporate vice president of interactive entertainment at Microsoft. Interview by Mark Androvich.