Microsoft Game Studios Interview: Next-Gen Partnerships

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Microsoft Game Studios Interview: Next-Gen Partnerships
By: TeamXbox Staff - "TeamXbox"
March 1st, 2005
The future of the Xbox successor is certainly getting brighter by the
day. After last week's announcement that legendary Final Fantasy
Creator, Hironobu Sakaguchi, and his Mistwalker studio agreed to
develop two games exclusive for the Xbox successor, Microsoft Game
Studios dropped yet another bomb today by adding the likes of Yoshiki
Okamoto and Tetsuya Mizuguchi to their stable of first-party partners.
Okamoto is well known for the likes of Street Fighter and the Resident
Evil series, while Mizuguchi has thrilled us with unique titles like
Rez and Space Channel 5.

It is obvious that Microsoft plans to build a strong foundation in the
Japanese market for the next generation and adding these three renowned
talents is a testament to that. We had a chance to briefly chat with
General Manager of Microsoft Game Studios regarding their recent
partnership announcements.


With three major partnership announcements during the past two weeks,
this has to be an exciting time for you and Microsoft Game Studios.

Shane Kim: Definitely. It's another salvo here at Microsoft. It's
another great piece of news after what we announced last week (the
partnership with Mistwalker) and it shows that we are committed to the
Japanese market. It's really great to be partnering with world-class
talent like Sakaguchi, Okomoto and Mizuguchi. It's very consistent
with what we've been trying to do in general in the first-party for a
while now. Adding these guys is something we are extremely proud of.


It appears that Microsoft has learned from the disappointing
performance of the Xbox in the Asian market. How do you think these
recent partnerships will affect the acceptance of the Xbox successor,
not only in Japan, but worldwide?

Shane Kim: These three guys (Hironobu Sakaguchi, Yoshiki Okamoto, and
Tetsuya Mizuguchi) in particular are well respected all over the world,
not just in Japan. With that said, working with these folks is going to
have a major impact in Japan and in Asia especially. There is no
question that this was very important for us to do. Beyond the
struggles that we've experienced in this generation, one of the
places that we've said all along where we need to step up is in the
quality of the first-party partners and titles that we publish in the
Japanese market. I expect a completely different set of results from
working with folks like these in the next generation.



Tetsuya Mizuguchi & Yoshiki Okamoto


Approximately how long has this partnership been in the works? Have
these partners had the next-gen hardware for some time?

Shane Kim: We've been working with them for a while. Of course we
can't go into specifics right now about the number of titles or
anything like that, but we've been courting each other for a while.


Being that these companies are also working on other next-gen hardware
aside from the Xbox successor, any titles created as a result of the
partnership with Microsoft will remain exclusive to the Xbox successor,
correct?

Shane Kim: Yes, the titles from this partnership will be exclusive to
the next-generation Xbox.


Can we expect to see these games in action at this year's E3?

Shane Kim: Sorry, but you're going to have to stay tuned on that.
You'll be hearing a lot more about the titles themselves in the
future.