Q: Of the remaining studios in the MGS family, Lionhead and Rare have been keeping particularly busy - Fable 2, Viva Pinata, Xbox Live avatars, Banjo - are their futures safe?
Phil Spencer: You just listed the work that those studios are doing, incredibly important to MGS. For Rare, this will be their fifth game in the first three years of the Xbox 360 - that's crazy. Two launch games? What studio on the planet signs up for two launch games? That's just crazy.
So the productivity and effort in those two studios is just great to see, and the number of studio resources we have in the UK - this is our largest concentration of studio resources anywhere on the planet. The studios, and the franchises, remain a very important part of our success.
Fable 2 is Fable coming to the 360 - Peter's promises and dreams - it's going to be a big game, I think there's a lot of anticipation for that game. And I was playing Too Human with somebody last night, co-op, somebody who I didn't know, and he went on and on about the anticipation of Fable 2.
An important part about those studios, and the creation of the MGS organisation in Europe, is for our platforms to succeed here. You see us doing more with Lips, local content here in the market so that people have German songs, and UK songs, and so on. We understand that this is a market made up of markets, and we have a leadership team in place on the content side that can help us tailor the different content.
And not only game content - the movie announcements that we did at E3 demonstrate that the Xbox 360 is a global product with regional understanding and excellence. The game experiences that we're building need to map to that. Having development resources here [in the UK] is a very important part of that.
But we don't want to build games that will only sell in one market, so we'll get Lips, that obviously has some specific European markets that it will do exceedingly well in, but we're going to market it and talk about it as the global game that we think it is.
We picked a developer in Japan, of all places, to build a game that we think will be incredibly important for Europe... but it was about making sure that the talent was lined up with the game that we were trying to build.
If you look at the games they've built in the past, like Elite Beat Agents, they've a history of having that music-rhythm backbone to their games - that makes them a perfect partner for us here. And having our European teams helping interface, making sure that we're building the right game for the markets is very critical to our success.
And Rare, and Lionhead, and Remedy, and the other relationships that we have here are really important.
