GamesBeat: And that’s a benefit of multitasking.
Whitten: Right. The architectural choices we’ve made are key for that. If you don’t make some of those key investments, you can’t do that in a seamless way.
GamesBeat: Would you say that you can pretty much match their processing performance?
Whitten: I haven’t spent enough time to know what their processing performance is. When I look at the power of the cloud and the power of our local processer and what our architecture allows, though, we’re going to have the definition of next-generation in games and experiences.
GamesBeat: The exclusives that are coming these days — how are they coming? Is it because people see the installed base and the larger momentum you had in the last couple of years? Is there a strategy behind how you bring in exclusives?
Whitten: We work closely with first party around a large set of content which you could call exclusives and with our third-party community to craft a system that allows them to get the most out of it, that allows them to do things that they couldn’t do on other systems. You heard Ben’s talk about what he can do with the cloud as he thinks about how to build Titanfall. They get very excited about that.
GamesBeat: Back to some of the answers that some people might feel are too complicated. How are you going to explain some of these interesting concepts to people? You have cloud processing. You have policies on digital content that will deliver benefits, but they’re not the same as the policies of the past. You have a lot of value in your box, but you have an apples-and-oranges comparison to Sony. How do you message this?
Whitten: The first thing I’ll say is that I’m focused on how to make it all simple and intuitive to use the system. I can walk into a room and say “Xbox on” and have it turn on and I understand how it works and things just magically work for me. Frankly, I hope to explain less and have people experience more. I don’t want to have to explain how these things work. I want them to just work for you, and then you feel great about them. I want that to go for any of the steps in our program, whether it’s how resale works for games or anything else. It should be simple. The tools are right there in front of you and you can use them in a simple way.
There are other things, like cloud, where I mostly want to talk about how great Drivatars are. To me, cloud is like GPU and CPU and the rest of the palette that we give to game creators. The best way to describe that is and will always be, “Let me show you something cool. You should play it right now because it’s awesome.” It’s about building that canvas for creators to fulfill their imaginations, not just me talking about, “Hey, here’s how our vertex buffers work.”
GamesBeat: On the cloud, one thing I don’t understand – I’ve talked to some of the chip experts, and they’re also a little puzzled – has to do with what happens when there’s a peak performance or processing requirement or an interruption that changes things. You could lose your Internet connection, or it could bog down for a period of time. Somebody else in the house starts watching Netflix or something. That bandwidth you had for the cloud is no longer there. What happens when something like this occurs?
Whitten: People are getting a little confused on the bandwidth versus the power of the cloud, because those are not actually directly related. The question you’re asking is about bandwidth. This is using a ton of processing power in the cloud, but it’s not using a ton of bandwidth to transmit the results. You go back to the thing we were talking about in Forza with Drivatars. Again, the Drivatar concept is these massive neural networks and machine learning and advanced server-farm computation. The results from that are things like position, A.I., here’s what you should do now. It’s not trying to send back the entire data set. It’s just sending back the results, which does not take a lot of bandwidth. The things that take a lot of bandwidth are what you talked about – streaming a movie on Netflix, things like that. Not necessarily using cloud computation.
GamesBeat: We saw Sony’s framerate drop unexpectedly yesterday in parts of their demos. That always seems to happen in most games. All of a sudden, you get to an intense part of the game and the framerate drops. How do you deal with that particular issue, whatever’s causing that?
Whitten: One thing I’ll say, shipping is hard and you’re always in the middle of working on your platforms, wherever they are, to get through those things. One other thing, as game developers, typically what you do is you spend a lot of time understanding the complexity of your scenes. You try to understand what are the degenerate cases. I remember early on in Halo, it was spinning around in a 360, which made the game try to pull in all this data really quickly. That’s what you try to focus on optimizing. You figure out how to work around that.
What we try to provide – and this is one of the benefits of Microsoft and the investments we’ve made around this for decades – are the tools, so that game developers can understand everything that’s happening inside of their game engine. They get that detailed ability to click inside of frames and understand that this is when they got blocked on CPU or GPU. Here’s what they can optimize. This is the overdraw. Here are some misses. That’s optimization. This is what game creators are great at, doing that optimization. As platform holders, we try to tell them as much as we can about the console and how it works, and then we give them the tools so that they can discover how their engine is working on it.