Xbox Live's Jerry Johnson Interview

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Eurogamer: Speaking of first and third parties, do you know when the GTA DLC is coming out? Does anyone?

Jerry Johnson: You're asking me that? You've at least got to buy me a few drinks! ["Winter," says a PR.]

Eurogamer: What do you think of the copycat Achievement systems like Trophies or Blizzard's WOW Achievement system?

Jerry Johnson: It's flattering, but at the same time I see... I don't want to knock what they've done, but one of the things we've done is keep it simple, because what you're trying to do is create a platform feature you want all games to take part in. We went through a lot of issues where we thought, let's make it different tiers, and make it really complicated, and then let's try to come up with rule-sets that dictate how games do this, and in the end working with publishers back in 2004 doing this, it became clear that trying to over-dictate how you do one of these programmes would be disastrous.

I like our system because games can do what they want with it. If we had set up really tight rules, would Geometry Wars ever have created the Pacifism Achievement? Those are the kind of things it helped generate. As a platform team you don't want to make rules that confine things; you want to give games tools so they can go out and create.

Eurogamer: That said, have you seen anything in those other systems that you like or would like to introduce? Or are you happy with it the way it is?

Jerry Johnson: I think that there's always something you want to try to do. There's not a single thing we've worked on that I wouldn't want to improve upon. I don't think there's a pressing need right now to prioritise some of the things we've thought about around Achievements that we want to do, compared to the opportunity on some of the other areas where we can really continue to grow. To a certain degree, Achievements are growing because of the way the community uses it, and the greatness from that is just going to come from the more people using it and the more games doing interesting things with it. I would be very careful of disturbing that system.

Eurogamer: To go back to NXE, is there anything you regret not doing, or couldn't do for 19th November?

Jerry Johnson: I think we would have liked to take certain parts of the Avatar system a bit deeper out of the gate, and not be waiting for another six months to continue where we roll some of these things out. Another thing I think we did is we put it on a very compressed time schedule. It is the reason why Primetime slipped. We asked a title to release concurrent with an entire platform, and when you release an entire platform you have dependencies on that platform for any content that's going on it. If I could have done anything differently with this release, I would have wanted to get all of the developer-facing things out for us to get more stuff integrated at launch time.

Eurogamer: Last Christmas you had a fair bit of Live downtime. Are you concerned at all about what's going to happen on 19th November?

Jerry Johnson: The service went down almost a month ago for a day, and that was the process of us moving to a new data-centre out in Washington. So many things have happened since that last holiday. The numbers that we were hitting at that holiday... When GTA launched, we beat all those numbers as far as concurrency goes, and concurrency is always our highest hit, and to be honest the type of play that goes on inside of Gears actually put more pressure on our system than the kind of play that any other game did. We were well over our million concurrency.

And since that day, we've not only solved some of the technical problems that were in place for the service, but we've continued to invest and scale up the servers. I've worked on servers for years and I'm always scared whenever anything's being released. If I said I wasn't scared then you should write a note that this guy's an idiot! Because no matter what happens you should always be scared. We're doing everything we can to be ready for it.

I can tell you that when Robbie Bach is on the phone on Christmas Day calling people asking what the hell is going on, and that's coming down from Steve Ballmer... that's the kind of attention it got last holiday. Many things have changed since then, and we realised the kind of growth trajectory we were on and had to prepare for it.

Eurogamer: If all 14 million Live users go online in a 24-hour period, you'll be able to cope with that?

Jerry Johnson: Yeah, I mean, the thing that goes on with this is a little bit different. Some of the things that happened last holiday, there's different aspects to the system. The thing that's going to be hit heavily to get the download is just bandwidth, so we distribute our content and it's all secure packages but we actually rely on other partners that are experts on delivering the volumes of content in a short amount of time.

Eurogamer: Final things, looking at the Xbox 360 Arcade SKU in this country, you get a 256MB Memory Unit, and you're quoting a need for 128MB of space for NXE. Do you know if they'll update the Memory Unit in the Arcade SKU?

Jerry Johnson: I think the clear message is that if you want to get on Live then you should go out and buy a hard drive to actually enjoy that entire experience. So when you see all the things that you're seeing up here - the rich graphics, the quickness and loading of graphics, all these different types of things, the ability to download this content, the ability to get demos, the ability to do this - the message should be clear: you really want to get a hard drive to do this. You want to go and get that 60GB starter pack for your Arcade. The Arcade's a great way to go sample and find out if you like games and these things, but if you want to get into the rich experience you want to go buy a hard drive.

Eurogamer: And when will this go into boxed 360s?

Jerry Johnson: After it releases on the 19th, our certification team... within a three or four week period, they'll start putting that flash - this whole update - on top of game discs, so game discs will start distributing, and then it'll work into manufacturing and they'll refresh the line - and that refresh will happen probably in some time early next year.