Those were the words from Kevin Browne, XSN Sports Studio Manager, when explaining the reasons behind Microsoft's decision to cancel its 2004 lineup of XSN Sports titles.
RalliSport Challenge 2 is still scheduled to ship in April, but after that, don't expect to see another XSN Sports game until 2005, and possibly not until the Xbox 2.
IGN Sports caught up with Browne and asked him about the decision, Microsoft's plans for the future, and what this means for ESPN and EA Sports. Here's what he had to say.
IGN Sports: Why did you decide to cancel this year's lineup of games?
Kevin Browne: When we shipped last year, we thought we had a pretty compelling list of games and a really, really interesting backend service that would enable customers to do things that they were never able to do before, that is create their own leagues and have the games track their stats and progress. I think the dominant piece of feedback that we heard on several of the titles was: "XSN Sports is so cool, I just wish we had better games to play with that service." And we're taking that to heart. We actually did think we had good games last year, but the market and the direct feedback that we have shows us that we fall short in a couple of areas to our competition, and we think it's the best thing we can do, to take this year off, and to close that quality gap that we have in respect to the EA Sports and ESPN sports titles. We'll come back in the market with a really strong lineup that does what we need it to do in terms of a first-party sports organization, which is to drive people to buy Xbox and to use our games over Xbox Live.
IGN Sports: Since you don't expect the next series of games to be released until 2005, does that mean that all of the games are now in development for Xbox 2 rather than the Xbox?
Kevin Browne: We haven't made any announcements about anything but the Xbox, so what we're talking about is this: We're developing for the Xbox and we're not going to ship a set of games because there are areas that we definitely need to work on, from graphics to control. There are areas that we definitely need to take advantage of in terms of the console's architecture. We haven't done a serious re-architecturing of the games since we initially launched on the platform, and as you know, when watching games that have been built subsequent to the initial shipment of the console, there's a heck of a lot more that you can do when you have time, and we're, right now, affording ourselves that time to truly take advantage of what the Xbox can do.
IGN Sports: But why cancel the entire lineup? Games like Inside Drive and Top Spin definitely have their followings.
Kevin Browne: Top Spin is one of those things that we think has a lot of legs. It's not something that we were thinking of as an every-year type of game, anyway. With Inside Drive, we're pretty pleased with the way the game plays, and it's popular enough over Xbox Live, but the question we have to ask ourselves as a first party is this: Are we giving people a compelling enough reason to buy an Xbox? And when you look at our game and compare it to the EA Sports or the ESPN games made by Sega, we don't have that clear, absolute advantage that you would expect us to have right now. We ship on just the Xbox platform and a game that's built specifically for the Xbox should showoff in every way visually and sound-wise as a game that's better than a game that's made to take advantage of some of the Xbox, but is mostly made to take advantage of the power of the PS2. As we looked at the opportunities we had to make that take place and we looked at the time we had to do that, and we just didn't feel that shipping this year would give our customers a truly compelling reason to go buy this year.
IGN Sports: Will the XSN Sports leagues that already exist for the older games remain up?
Kevin Browne: Yes. We will continue to support that. We are not even thinking of a date to shut it down. We are actually looking at ways of improving it and we're pretty excited about some of the work that we have done in the preproduction phase. But as I said in the beginning, the games have to be worth playing in order to be worth playing on XSNsports.com.
IGN Sports: Are any of the titles cancelled permanently?
Kevin Browne: No, that is not factored into it at all. Top Spin and Amped are not necessarily every year games. Links is something that we're taking a hard look at what we need to do. Fever, Inside Drive, and Rivals are all purely matters of wanting to make the games clear leaders by taking advantage of the power of the Xbox.
IGN Sports: What do you think will make XSN more successful with the next wave of games in 2005?
Kevin Browne: It all comes back to games, games, games. We thought we had much better product in Fever and Inside Drive, we were very excited about Rivals, but the marketplace spoke. We need to have that game that blows you away at every respect.
IGN Sports: Does this open the door for EA Sports to go online with Xbox Live this year as now they will have less competition?
Kevin Browne: Well, nobody talks to me about that. [laughs] I can only tell you that our decisions are only driven by the fact that we don't want to go out there and ask customers to spend money for something that we are not convinced is absolutely the best that we think we can make.
IGN Sports: Last year, the ESPN games weren't allowed to have Xbox leagues because of XSN. Now that the Microsoft lineup is not coming out, will the ESPN games be allowed to have leagues this year?
Kevin Browne: This past year, it wasn't a matter of them not being allowed, it was more that the technology came in at a latter date than what they felt comfortable reacting to. The ability exists for them to have the same sort of league functionality that exists for XSN Sports, and with the Tsunami release of Xbox Live that comes out this spring, they'll have an even better ability. My hope is that they take advantage of it, and if EA decides that they want to be on Xbox Live this year, that they'll take advantage of those capabilities and provide great sports games for Xbox customers.
IGN Sports: Are there going to be new developers assigned to the games?
Kevin Browne: We are changing one set of developers. We are going away from High Voltage Software and establishing a relationship with a developer that's closer to home. But for all of the other games, the previous developers are in place.
IGN Sports: Word is that Sega's ESPN license expires at the end of this year. Is there any interest in purchasing that license to launch the next series of XSN Sports games?
Kevin Browne: No, I don't think so. Sega is obviously a very important Microsoft partner, and I'd love to see things with ESPN work out and for them to be very, very successful. For our purposes, we're pretty intent on making a go of the strategy that we have.
IGN Sports: Do you expect the next wave of games will begin with baseball in April 2005?
Kevin Browne: We're still trying to figure out our approach to baseball. As you know, we had Inside Pitch, but we're not doing Inside Pitch for this year. We also purchased the High Heat code base, and I think we have some great opportunities to make some great inroads to baseball. Baseball, outside of NASCAR, is the most well-attended national sport out there, but as a video game category, it's not anywhere as big as you'd think it would be. It's less than a third of the football market. So I think we just want to take an approach where we're releasing games that we're proud of and that energize customers on a level that we think they should.
IGN Sports: So if baseball isn't the next game, and you won't comment on Xbox 2, when should we expect to see the next XSN Sports game in 2005?
Kevin Browne: Stay tuned. What the marketplace has told us is, when it's ready, and that's what I truly believe.