Microsoft's Shane Kim talks MGS4 on 360, Halo movie (page 3 of 3)

On that note, Microsoft Game Studios has acquired many great game studios; you have Rare, Bungee, Lionhead, and Ensemble as part of that line up. Is acquiring major talent still a major goal moving forward?

SK: As head of Microsoft Game Studios, I don't have a plan that says "we have to own X number of studios." Every situation is different and sometimes owning the studio isn't the right thing for either party. There are a lot of studios are fiercely independent and...we're a great publishing partner for those folks. We help make Remedy better, we help make Epic better, we make BioWare better, but then there are other cases.

Running a game studio is tough work, particularly as you start to get bigger. Ask Peter Molyneux! He felt really great about our acquisition of Lionhead Studios and we felt it made sense for us from a corporate strategy stand point, so we went ahead and did it. But that's not going to be the case every time. There's no formula and we take everything on a case-by-case basis.

Given where the Xbox 360 is positioned, if you were going to acquire a company, do you think you veer towards getting a hardcore company right now, or one that has a more casual appeal?

If acquisition was the right thing to do, and it's not always, I would opt for talent over genre. What this industry is about is being able to create hits over and over again. Not just sequels, but new intellectual properties...games that will become the next Halo. That's what we look for.

Hypothetically speaking, if you said, "look, we've got to be in the music rhythm business," then you might say, "Look, we've got to go buy Harmonix." Maybe in that very specialized situation, and I don't consider FPSs or RPGs to be that specialized, but the music rhythm genre, well maybe that would be one case.

Though Viva Pi?ata was critically acclaimed, it didn't set the world on fire. Yet Microsoft seems to have faith in it because you have a new party game coming out. Are you guys real believers in Viva Pinata?

We're in it for the long term, and I agree that we haven't sold 100 million units of Viva Pi?ata yet, but when we survey the customers of that game, everybody loves it. Honestly, the main issue is that we aren't yet at a mass market price point yet for the Xbox 360. We needed to launch Viva Pi?ata last year because we had to demonstrate to the world that we're serious about broadening Xbox 360. But the Xbox 360 is still priced from $300 to $400, and that's ahuge price point for some people, especially the target demographic for a Viva Pi?ata title.

Once we get to those mass market price points, and this is why we're going to continue to invest in Viva Pi?ata, we'll be in the sweet spot of the console life cycle.

Can you explain what that Halo short movie was about? Was it real time?

It was live action. What you saw was a short film that's not related to any movie. Neill Blomkamp is the director, with Peter Jackson as executive producer, and he wanted to work on the Halo movie. The Halo movie is not in production. The studios that were involved, for whatever reason decided to back out of it, but we're still very interested in talking to people in Hollywood about it.

In the meantime, we're going to use these film shorts to help promote the Halo universe and get the world super excited and crazy for Halo 3. Neill did an amazing job on that short film. I'm a huge fan of the Halo universe, and watching that short film sent goosebumps all over. That's Halo coming to life in a way that I think I lot of people can really get into it, even if they're not videogame players. We think Halo can be one of those epic stories like Star Wars. We still have work to do, there's no question about that, but we believe that Halo has the potential.

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