Interview With Xbox Live’s Jerry Johnson
Written by Connor Beaton, published 28th August 2010
We took the opportunity at Edinburgh Interactive on Wednesday to talk with Jerry Johnson, general manager of Xbox Live in Europe. We spoke about a wide range of topics: Kinect; social features; membership fees; the Halo: Reach leak; PC-360 cross-platform play; and more. Read the complete unabridged interview below and don’t forget to leave a comment when you’re done.
Alright, can you start by explaining your role within Microsoft?
My name is Jerry Johnson. I’m going to be talking tomorrow about Xbox Live primarily. Nick, who was here early, was over from Rare and he’s been talking about Kinect and downloading and I tonight I think if you go over to the event you’ll get a chance to meet him and see some of the hands-on with Kinect Sports. My background is, I started with Microsoft about twelve or thirteen years ago. I started working in the entertainment side on MSN, but went over to Xbox and joined Xbox Live right as it launched in November 2002. I’ve been with Xbox Live since then.
My role has been basically in the platform team back in Redmond, I’ve been through the European expansion, Halo 2 launch, and everything we did for that, right into the launch of the 360, and I was running the entire team when we shipped NXE back in Redmond. And then, right about that time, we made a decision we wanted to start doing more development here in Europe for Europe. And by that, I mean not the gaming side, but the general entertainment side. We’ve done Netflix in the US, and we had an opportunity to start to build a partnership with Sky, BSkyB and Canal in France, so I came over here in January of last year and I was running two teams: I had the team over here that we were building that did Sky and Canal, and we also picked up the Last.fm work; and we also had a team that I was running back in Redmond that was responsible for Facebook, Twitter and Netflix.
So my background has been building the platform for the gaming around Live, up till this last year and now I’ve started to kind of diverge, and we’re calling it a studio, akin to a game studio, but focussed on interactive experiences wrapped around broader media and broader entertainment. Right now I’m located in London, we’ve got a studio of about thirty people right now that we’ve built up over there. Most of the people there have a game development background; I’ve got people from Rare and Lionhead that joined the team all the way to people who were working at Rockstar, Frontier and Crytek, as well as people that are from the general entertainment industry like Sky and News Corp. and some other companies.
So, quick overview: I’m the Live guy. (laughs)
So, you’ve mentioned Kinect. I believe you’ve made some changes to the Xbox Dashboard with the Kinect launch?
Every year, sometimes more than once a year, we do an update to the entirety of what we call the “flash” that runs on the box, and that entails updating the UI, adding functionality, and in conjunction with Kinect there’ll be an interface update, and the most noticeable thing everybody will see will be the new Kinect hub if you’ve got the camera plugged in, which enables both voice and motion control of aspects of the dashboard.
Are you expecting a lot more Xbox Live members after Kinect’s launch?
I believe that Kinect and Live kind of go hand in hand, I think there are lot of features and functionality that Live is going to help deliver with Kinect. I also think that Kinect opens up a whole new window of ways for people to communicate. I mean, you guys are gamers, you’re used to wearing a headset. You don’t have to wear a headset any more. My wife won’t let me wear the headset if we have company over. (laughs)
So, do I believe it’ll get more people connected? Yes, I believe you’re going to get more people using Live and I think you’re going to get a different type of deeper engagement with that.
Well, Kinect appeals a lot to casual audiences. Do you think casual audience will be turned off by Xbox Live Gold’s subscription fee?
We look at all the different value that actually goes into the Xbox Live Gold membership. I mean, it provides things from access to being able to do party mode and talk to your friends while you’re watching TV to multiplayer player-run games in Arcade. So, there’s a lot of different components that actually make up the Gold, it’s not just playing Halo and Call of Duty multiplayer shooters. So we believe there’s a good value propped up around that. We believe it’s going to appeal to those broader audiences as well.
You’ve mentioned some of the social features such as Facebook, Twitter and Last.fm. How do you think those enhance the experience for gamers?
For gamers? Well, one thing is I think that gamers also like entertainment. When we bring something such as Sky over to the platform, we know that one of the most-watched things is live football on Sky Sports related to having Sky brought over. We actually think that what we’re doing is in some ways not directly appealing to the broader audience, but rather taking some of these broader entertainment features and delivering them to the hardcore gamer and our most passionate fans in a way that’s compelling to them, and then they’re actually the best advocates for bringing in the broader audience.
A perfect example that I love to use, is my wife would never let us have an Xbox in the bedroom. This has been a hard-fast rule since I’ve been working there since 2002. Once we got Sky and we had video and movies on demand and she could access the entire library, all of a sudden I can play Call of Duty in the bedroom when she’s not around. So it goes back to the point that I think there are aspects related to this, whether it’s the social features such as Facebook, Twitter, Last.fm or Sky that do appeal to the hardcore, and I think those are some of the people who are using these features and actually being some of our best advocates.
Some games, such as the Colonies Edition of Lost Planet, have a feature in which they can play with the PC users of the game as well…
Yeah, some like Shadowrun.
But there aren’t actually many games that take advantage of that. Why do you think that might be?
One of the announcements that happened recently was Win Phone 7, so I think I need to say that Live is a service, so it’s not tied specifically to a particular device, and I think what you’ll find is that just like any kind of content that people create, a lot of times they’ll gear certain mechanics of that content that are going to be optimised for certain devices or certain types of experiences or environments. I think Live is a tool that people can connect but I think some of the more interesting things are, well, you guys check your Gamerscore and Achievements, right? Do you check them on the web?
Occasionally, yeah.
Do you have a little tag that you put up on your email? Alright, where does that come from? It pulls off the service that is actually part of the web. So I think that’s an example of how you’re not really earning achievements, you’re actually showing them off. And I think back to your question about cross-platform play, I think that Windows games, a lot of the times, do different things with it, they take advantage of Achievements, they take advantage of Gamerscore, and they will be taking advantage of Avatars and these other pieces just like Mobile. I think that there’s different ways you interact within our service, and it’s not always head-to-head multiplayer cross-platform.
Some games, like BioShock 2, have separate Achievements entries for the PC and Xbox 360 entries, even though the two games have the exact same Achievements – but you can’t compare between platforms.
Yeah, there’s a separate set, you’ve got a 1000 over here, a 1000 over here, you’ve got the 1550.
Is there an actual ability to have a shared set of Achievements between two versions of the game, or is that not possible?
There’s a technical requirement related to the way we do title IDs and the way we actually aggregate and show some of these things. The way it’s been set up, because they’re two different title IDs, they will actually have two different sets of Achievements. It is actually possible for two games to be networking, if you have one game talking to another game you can award and keep things in sync if the title actually decides to do something like that.
There was a news piece earlier this week about the leak of Halo: Reach and there were a large number of Xbox Live bans regarding people playing the game online. Do you think Xbox Live bans actually help combat piracy?
One of the things we pride ourselves on Live is that it’s a secure system that tries to protect the community from griefing and cheating and those sorts of things, so we don’t make any public comments related to any of the banning or anything like that, but one thing I will say related to anything you read about security on the system: we take it very seriously and part of the value you pay in a Gold subscription is knowing you actually have some security. There’s a value related to what you created with your profile and your achievements, and if everybody could just go out and do things to gain as many achievements as possible, or school the Gamerscore system or cheat in games, it would completely de-value what everybody respects in Live.
This leak of Halo: Reach actually originated from the Marketplace as I understand. Will you be taking any protective measures against things like this happening?
We don’t talk at all about any of our security measures.
About Games on Demand, I noticed actually that there are no plans to release Halo Reach on Games on Demand. In fact, a relatively small number of games are available on Games On Demand. Is there any reason why that is?
Right now, Games on Demand focusses on back-catalogue titles, titles that have been in market for a certain amount of time. You can kind of think of it as the long-tail content we distribute through Marketplace, and we’re always evaluating the timing and the market approach to bringing games to digital distribution, but right now we’ve got a great relationship with our retail partners and we balance that.
Is the Games on Demand service really quite successful at the moment?
Yes.
With Kinect launching and a lot more Xbox Live members joining, I’ve heard some things about the Avatar system changing. Is that true?
Any changes, trust me, all the Avatars will work, look and do everything, like we would never disrupt that entirely.
Live obviously is coming to Windows Phone 7. Can you talk about some of the ways it’s doing that?
It’s going to be a staged released, we’re working really closely with the Windows Phone 7 team; in fact, we have an entire Live development group that’s focussed on building app services and actually going through and figuring out which we open up and integrate them. Right now it’s really focussed on some of the most compelling stuff we know drives engagements and right now it’s Achievements and Gamerscore and we’ll be bringing Avatars with a render that runs on there as well, so you can actually do some interesting things with Avatars and kind of tie into the Live community. And you can expect to see that continue to evolve continuously, just as you saw Live on consoles continue to grow.
Alright, well that’s all the questions I’ve got for you. Thanks a lot.
Thanks.
My name is Jerry Johnson. I’m going to be talking tomorrow about Xbox Live primarily. Nick, who was here early, was over from Rare and he’s been talking about Kinect and downloading and I tonight I think if you go over to the event you’ll get a chance to meet him and see some of the hands-on with Kinect Sports. My background is, I started with Microsoft about twelve or thirteen years ago. I started working in the entertainment side on MSN, but went over to Xbox and joined Xbox Live right as it launched in November 2002. I’ve been with Xbox Live since then.
My role has been basically in the platform team back in Redmond, I’ve been through the European expansion, Halo 2 launch, and everything we did for that, right into the launch of the 360, and I was running the entire team when we shipped NXE back in Redmond. And then, right about that time, we made a decision we wanted to start doing more development here in Europe for Europe. And by that, I mean not the gaming side, but the general entertainment side. We’ve done Netflix in the US, and we had an opportunity to start to build a partnership with Sky, BSkyB and Canal in France, so I came over here in January of last year and I was running two teams: I had the team over here that we were building that did Sky and Canal, and we also picked up the Last.fm work; and we also had a team that I was running back in Redmond that was responsible for Facebook, Twitter and Netflix.
So my background has been building the platform for the gaming around Live, up till this last year and now I’ve started to kind of diverge, and we’re calling it a studio, akin to a game studio, but focussed on interactive experiences wrapped around broader media and broader entertainment. Right now I’m located in London, we’ve got a studio of about thirty people right now that we’ve built up over there. Most of the people there have a game development background; I’ve got people from Rare and Lionhead that joined the team all the way to people who were working at Rockstar, Frontier and Crytek, as well as people that are from the general entertainment industry like Sky and News Corp. and some other companies.
So, quick overview: I’m the Live guy. (laughs)
So, you’ve mentioned Kinect. I believe you’ve made some changes to the Xbox Dashboard with the Kinect launch?
Every year, sometimes more than once a year, we do an update to the entirety of what we call the “flash” that runs on the box, and that entails updating the UI, adding functionality, and in conjunction with Kinect there’ll be an interface update, and the most noticeable thing everybody will see will be the new Kinect hub if you’ve got the camera plugged in, which enables both voice and motion control of aspects of the dashboard.
Are you expecting a lot more Xbox Live members after Kinect’s launch?
I believe that Kinect and Live kind of go hand in hand, I think there are lot of features and functionality that Live is going to help deliver with Kinect. I also think that Kinect opens up a whole new window of ways for people to communicate. I mean, you guys are gamers, you’re used to wearing a headset. You don’t have to wear a headset any more. My wife won’t let me wear the headset if we have company over. (laughs)
So, do I believe it’ll get more people connected? Yes, I believe you’re going to get more people using Live and I think you’re going to get a different type of deeper engagement with that.
Well, Kinect appeals a lot to casual audiences. Do you think casual audience will be turned off by Xbox Live Gold’s subscription fee?
We look at all the different value that actually goes into the Xbox Live Gold membership. I mean, it provides things from access to being able to do party mode and talk to your friends while you’re watching TV to multiplayer player-run games in Arcade. So, there’s a lot of different components that actually make up the Gold, it’s not just playing Halo and Call of Duty multiplayer shooters. So we believe there’s a good value propped up around that. We believe it’s going to appeal to those broader audiences as well.
You’ve mentioned some of the social features such as Facebook, Twitter and Last.fm. How do you think those enhance the experience for gamers?
For gamers? Well, one thing is I think that gamers also like entertainment. When we bring something such as Sky over to the platform, we know that one of the most-watched things is live football on Sky Sports related to having Sky brought over. We actually think that what we’re doing is in some ways not directly appealing to the broader audience, but rather taking some of these broader entertainment features and delivering them to the hardcore gamer and our most passionate fans in a way that’s compelling to them, and then they’re actually the best advocates for bringing in the broader audience.
A perfect example that I love to use, is my wife would never let us have an Xbox in the bedroom. This has been a hard-fast rule since I’ve been working there since 2002. Once we got Sky and we had video and movies on demand and she could access the entire library, all of a sudden I can play Call of Duty in the bedroom when she’s not around. So it goes back to the point that I think there are aspects related to this, whether it’s the social features such as Facebook, Twitter, Last.fm or Sky that do appeal to the hardcore, and I think those are some of the people who are using these features and actually being some of our best advocates.
Some games, such as the Colonies Edition of Lost Planet, have a feature in which they can play with the PC users of the game as well…
Yeah, some like Shadowrun.
But there aren’t actually many games that take advantage of that. Why do you think that might be?
One of the announcements that happened recently was Win Phone 7, so I think I need to say that Live is a service, so it’s not tied specifically to a particular device, and I think what you’ll find is that just like any kind of content that people create, a lot of times they’ll gear certain mechanics of that content that are going to be optimised for certain devices or certain types of experiences or environments. I think Live is a tool that people can connect but I think some of the more interesting things are, well, you guys check your Gamerscore and Achievements, right? Do you check them on the web?
Occasionally, yeah.
Do you have a little tag that you put up on your email? Alright, where does that come from? It pulls off the service that is actually part of the web. So I think that’s an example of how you’re not really earning achievements, you’re actually showing them off. And I think back to your question about cross-platform play, I think that Windows games, a lot of the times, do different things with it, they take advantage of Achievements, they take advantage of Gamerscore, and they will be taking advantage of Avatars and these other pieces just like Mobile. I think that there’s different ways you interact within our service, and it’s not always head-to-head multiplayer cross-platform.
Some games, like BioShock 2, have separate Achievements entries for the PC and Xbox 360 entries, even though the two games have the exact same Achievements – but you can’t compare between platforms.
Yeah, there’s a separate set, you’ve got a 1000 over here, a 1000 over here, you’ve got the 1550.
Is there an actual ability to have a shared set of Achievements between two versions of the game, or is that not possible?
There’s a technical requirement related to the way we do title IDs and the way we actually aggregate and show some of these things. The way it’s been set up, because they’re two different title IDs, they will actually have two different sets of Achievements. It is actually possible for two games to be networking, if you have one game talking to another game you can award and keep things in sync if the title actually decides to do something like that.
There was a news piece earlier this week about the leak of Halo: Reach and there were a large number of Xbox Live bans regarding people playing the game online. Do you think Xbox Live bans actually help combat piracy?
One of the things we pride ourselves on Live is that it’s a secure system that tries to protect the community from griefing and cheating and those sorts of things, so we don’t make any public comments related to any of the banning or anything like that, but one thing I will say related to anything you read about security on the system: we take it very seriously and part of the value you pay in a Gold subscription is knowing you actually have some security. There’s a value related to what you created with your profile and your achievements, and if everybody could just go out and do things to gain as many achievements as possible, or school the Gamerscore system or cheat in games, it would completely de-value what everybody respects in Live.
This leak of Halo: Reach actually originated from the Marketplace as I understand. Will you be taking any protective measures against things like this happening?
We don’t talk at all about any of our security measures.
About Games on Demand, I noticed actually that there are no plans to release Halo Reach on Games on Demand. In fact, a relatively small number of games are available on Games On Demand. Is there any reason why that is?
Right now, Games on Demand focusses on back-catalogue titles, titles that have been in market for a certain amount of time. You can kind of think of it as the long-tail content we distribute through Marketplace, and we’re always evaluating the timing and the market approach to bringing games to digital distribution, but right now we’ve got a great relationship with our retail partners and we balance that.
Is the Games on Demand service really quite successful at the moment?
Yes.
With Kinect launching and a lot more Xbox Live members joining, I’ve heard some things about the Avatar system changing. Is that true?
Any changes, trust me, all the Avatars will work, look and do everything, like we would never disrupt that entirely.
Live obviously is coming to Windows Phone 7. Can you talk about some of the ways it’s doing that?
It’s going to be a staged released, we’re working really closely with the Windows Phone 7 team; in fact, we have an entire Live development group that’s focussed on building app services and actually going through and figuring out which we open up and integrate them. Right now it’s really focussed on some of the most compelling stuff we know drives engagements and right now it’s Achievements and Gamerscore and we’ll be bringing Avatars with a render that runs on there as well, so you can actually do some interesting things with Avatars and kind of tie into the Live community. And you can expect to see that continue to evolve continuously, just as you saw Live on consoles continue to grow.
Alright, well that’s all the questions I’ve got for you. Thanks a lot.
Thanks.
