News · 10 Jun 2011 · MTW Editorial Team
The consolidation of Microsoft’s online assets and services is continuing its slow march with the upcoming integration of Xbox Live into Windows 8. Seeing Microsoft’s online gaming hub on all of the company’s platform is definitely natural but people should expect much out of this especially in terms of cross-platform multi-player scenarios or even cross-platform game development.
A: Live has been successful on the Windows Phone. Live will be built into the PC. It will be the service where you get your entertainment. We were talking about it — you will not just see consoles and handhelds at this show next year, this show’s going to morph into other devices.
A: We think there’s a lot of potential on the Windows phones. With the Nokia relationship, we’re going to have a lot more distribution of phones and Live will be the primary entertainment service. I think that’s going to be a good play for us.
If we have that and the PCs to leverage, that will be a big Live base. It’s our job to make “buy a movie in one place and play it everywhere, buy a game in one place and play it everywhere.” Making things portable will be a big focus of ours.
On the development front, Microsoft has always been vocal about it’s Silverlight and XNA cross-platform development story but the “same code for all platforms” mantra has its limits. The huge power difference between a phone, Xbox 360, PC and different input mechanism (touch only on Windows Phones, gamepad on console etc.) makes developing cross-platform games impractical unless it’s simple 2D games similar to Angry Birds. Cross platform multi-playing is also a big no no (Microsoft knows this after the total failure that was Shadowrun on Xbox 360 and PC) unless it’s relatively “simple” games like pocker/chess (btw, Microsoft has yet to implement real multi-player gaming on Windows Phone 7).
Applications on the other hand are more suited for this type of cross-platform development scenarios and having Silvlerlight on Xbox 360 will surely be interesting. But even then, assets will have to be tailored for the different platforms because of the targeted screen resolution and user input. In the time it took for Microsoft to finally start this ecosystem consolidation new technologies and competing offerings have emerged, making this process even more difficult for the software giant. The company’s big push behind HTML5 and relatively low profile in terms of Silverlight talk is a clear sign of this market mutation. Silverlight isn’t going to suddenly disappear but it is no longer pushed by Microsoft as the preferred cross-platform solution either. Sure it’s probably coming to Xbox 360 and this will open new opportunities for .Net developers but Microsoft has still a lot to answer at the upcoming Build conference in September.
via Seatle Times
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