Mark Maslowicz interview

This year’s E3 was massive for the big three. While Nintendo made a splash with the first public showing of the Wii and Sony tried to dazzle with its PS3, Microsoft’s offering was far less extravagant. With no new gaming hardware on display, the company chose to showcase exclusive games such as Alan Wake, Gears of War and Halo 3. We caught up with Mark Maslowicz, Group Manager of Xbox Third-party relations in Europe, to talk about how Microsoft thought E3 went for them.

Pro-G: How does Microsoft see this year’s E3? A success, or could more have been done?

Mark Maslowicz: Well, we don’t like to get carried away. We will be interested to see how everyone in the long lead press thought it went for us, but so far from the online press, it looks pretty good. But as always, you don’t want to count your chickens before they hatch. I think we came into the show thinking it was going to be an interesting one for us. We’ve done the new hardware last year and our competitors are doing it this year, so we felt it was going to be tough to compete. As good as our line-up was going to be – and I think it’s an amazing software line-up – it was always going to be tough to compete with two big platform unveils.

Pro-G: What kind of feedback have you been getting about how Microsoft has faired at E3?

MM: The feedback that we’ve had is that certainly we haven’t lost the briefing and the general consensus is that Sony seems to have disappointed a lot of people with the software line-up, pricing and various other announcements and strategies. I think Nintendo are Nintendo. I’m a gamer, so I respect what Nintendo do, and I think they’ll do very well in their own market, but I don’t think they’re even trying to compete in the same big, mass-market as us. They’re carving out their own niche, and I think they’re going to be very happy with that. So, from that point of view, our major competitor hasn’t had as good a show as maybe we were expecting. Certainly the feedback from press, retail and publishers has been really complimentary towards us. We are in a very strong position, but you never want to get too carried away.

Pro-G: So, the GTA announcement. Big huh?

MM: I’d like to point out that the GTA announcement… I’d like to think of that as a turning point in the industry really. You have the biggest franchise of the last five years that has always led on Sony, and now you have publishers realising that they’re not going to make as much money on PS3 as 360. You just don’t have the install base. Obviously this year there isn’t, but we’re going to have 10 million before they even launch. But even next year; if you do the maths with the run rates, production rates based on what Sony is saying, even if they are going to beat us – which obviously we don’t think they will – it’s going to take them several years to catch up to where we’re at. I don’t think they can do it unless they show something substantially better than what they’ve got, but they might have something hiding in their back pocket we don’t know about. For their sake, I hope they do. I mean, I’ve played their line up and they don’t seem to have a killer app at launch, which is something you need anyway, but particularly if you’re trying to get people to spend $200 more than [it costs to buy] a machine that’s already out with a strong line-up of games, an arcade etc. So from that point of view, I get the sense that publishers are beginning to see that the tide is turning. Xbox 360 is being seen by most publishers as their lead format over PS3, because they’re businesses and at the end of the day, that’s where they’re going to make more money.

Pro-G: Sony did disappoint a lot of fans with their pricing, but one point in particular was the slating of the 360 by Sony because it didn’t have HDMI, when we now know that the most affordable PS3 SKU doesn’t support HDMI either?

MM: Hopefully it’s taught people a lesson that we would’ve taught people a long time ago: don’t trust what Sony says. I’m in a unique position because, like Peter Moore, I was at SEGA when Dreamcast came out, and they tired that on with SEGA and it worked with Dreamcast because SEGA didn’t have the money or as much widespread support and, maybe, the respect on a technical level as Sony did. Sony was widely regarded at the time as being technically superior. I think it’s very difficult for Sony to say that Microsoft, which is a technology company, is technically inferior. I think with Xbox 1 we established that we were the more advanced console and that has a legacy that lasts. I think people would assume that because the PS3 came later, it would have to be more powerful. But we told people a year ago that we compared the specs and their machine is no more powerful. In fact we actually think the 360 is more powerful in some respects and people didn’t believe us. I think it’s being borne out in what people are seeing now with Gears of War; it’s better than anything Sony have got. Sony’s mistake, if you want to call it that, is what they did last year. By lying at the time and showing off some fake videos, there was only one way they could go this time round, and it’s a long way down from where they were last year. So, by doing well last year, they took that gamble to do well then and it’s backfired on them when they couldn’t live up to the expectation they’ve set. The challenge for us is to make sure that people across the world understand that. We’ve got the titles; we’ve got the momentum.

Pro-G: What titles differentiate Xbox 360 from the PS3?

MM: It’s not just GTA. My personal favourite, Pro Evo; there’s a game that’s coming out this year on 360 and it’s not going to be on PS3. WWE Smackdown! Vs RAW; there’s another title that’s only been on Sony formats, on 360 [as well as PS3 this year]. One by one, these big Sony franchises are not going to be on Sony [exclusively] anymore. There’s still a few there with some of the Japanese guys, but even then. Lost Planet and Dead Rising have some of Capcom’s best people (Keiji Inafune has worked on the Onimusha series) and some of their best development talent are working on exclusive 360 titles; they’re not working on PS3 games. Things are definitely changing in the industry.