Interview: Microsoft's Chris Satchell Talks XNA Community Games, Zune & More

[FZD]

Here's GameDaily's recent interview with Chris Satchell, GM of the Game Developer Group for Microsoft.

GameDaily BIZ: During the Microsoft keynote you talked enthusiastically about the Xbox Live Community Games, but you didn't get into the business aspect. Can you talk a bit about the business model behind this?

Chris Satchell: We're not actually looking at that at the moment. We've got a beta coming in spring and what I really want to do is see the usage patterns through the beta to understand what would make sense, because really the big step and what's exciting is this: getting that pipeline there to democratize distribution and take those 10 million gamers and connect them with all those creators and ideas out there, that's the big, cool step. The other thing we can look at later, but what I really want to do is make sure we get that [first] bit right. When we talk to the community the biggest thing they want is just to have an audience that cares about their work. You can imagine, if you're a musician and you get really good and you never get any way to play for people that would be terrible. When you think about a community that's super engaged in gaming, Live's incredible, which is why you get numbers like 5.4 billion hours of gameplay. You talk about engagement and then you talk about size – so the pioneering step is to open that up.

Read the rest of the interview over at their website: Click here

Hope you find it an interesting read!

FZD