Microsoft's Shane Kim talks MGS4 4 on 360, Halo movie

The Lost E3 Interview! GamePro speaks with Shane Kim about the possibilities of Metal Gear Solid 4 landing on the Xbox 360, plus Microsoft's plans (if any) for acquiring more game studios.

GamePro: Microsoft showed off a ton of games during the E3 press briefing. The one question I walked away with was, how do I as a gamer prioritize the game line up?

Shane Kim: It's great that people think about it in terms of wish lists, and if you ask 10 different people, you're going to get 10 different wish lists. This is the point we we're trying to make: We didn't have a bunch of new titles, but the briefing was about showing people that [the games are] right here and right now.

The big significant third-party title of any consequence that isn't on the Xbox 360 is Metal Gear Solid 4, and Konami even said "Who knows, maybe that'll happen."

So are you feeling bullish on [getting Metal Gear Solid 4 on the Xbox 360]?

SK: Well we're certainly feeling bullish about third-party support in general. If you look at it from an economic standpoint, third parties have to support more than one platform. That's their business model. Titles are just getting way too expensive. How much do you think that Konami is spending on MGS4? So economically they've got to leverage that the best that they can. So it's really up to the first parties to create the content that's going to differentiate the platforms and that's where we think we have the competitive advantage.

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Speaking of Halo 3, I think lots of people have cleared their schedules for that game. Does Microsoft have a target number for selling consoles due to the release of Halo 3?

SK: We think that Halo 3 will be the biggest consumer entertainment launch this year. I believe a lot of Xbox 360s will sell, but the problem about numbers is you don't get a lot of that information back from retailers, so it's really hard to know how many we'll sell due to Halo 3. We can look in general what happens to sales rates of the Xbox 360 and we know we saw that in the past, it's the same thing that we saw with Halo 2. System movers move the systems whether it's Xbox Live or it's the Xbox 360. September 25 is going to be a big day for both of those.

You guys obviously set the pace for online gaming. What's interesting to me is Sony's strategy of releasing exclusive titles, things like Tekken 5 Dark Resurrection [or Pain or Super Stardust HD], for their online store. Compared to that, Microsoft focuses more on retro arcade downloads, games like Double Dragon and Joust. In the future do you plan on releasing more made-from-scratch exclusive titles for Xbox Live Arcade?

SK: I think we're already doing that. First of all the volume of eyeballs and the volume of business we're already doing on Xbox Live and Xbox arcade dwarves anything that's happening on Playstation now. These developers and publishers of arcade level titles, new and retro, are looking at us saying "that's a great distribution channel." We're getting plenty of retro stuff, and you're going to see more and more new stuff...[Arcade] is not our system seller, even though there are probably people who buy the system for it. I think you're going to see the same thing in the arcade that we are seeing in console games, things are going to get better and better. People are going to figure out how to build more and do more.

With that said do you plan on still focusing on the retro tiles?

SK: I think they'll still be there. And it's not just us, it's the other publishers as well. It's almost like a video-on-demand service. It's another way they can get their content out there in front of more people.

[Retro titles] are also a way to keep an IP in people's mind. Look at Contra...I think developers are going to [say] "let's create an Xbox Live Arcade game and determine if it has potential to go full retail." It's almost like what we do today from a prototyping standpoint. Now you can prototype and finish a lot more, and get it distributed.

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