Last week, following the announcements from the big three console makers, we had the opportunity to catch up with Albert Penello, senior director of global marketing for Xbox 360, to talk about his company's new motion push with Kinect, the newly introduced Xbox 360 slim hardware design, among other topics. Here's the Q&A.
IndustryGamers: I think a lot of people were very curious as to why there was no actual price or official launch scheme that was unveiled; it was just kind of the rebranding from Natal to Kinect and you started showing off all the unique applications and publisher support. Can you talk a little bit about that strategy and why we haven’t seen the other details?
Albert Penello: Yeah, I think E3 is dense with news. And I think the problem the minute you talk about price is if you haven’t established the value and if you haven’t established the quality of the offerings, the price discussion is meaningless. So I think for us, the decision was obviously we’ve got a new console launching today, earlier this week... And so we’ve got a whole new console we have to talk about, we’ve got all the experiences and technology that we needed to talk about and we have a lot of time before the holiday season. So I think what we decided to do was stage our news, and say, “let's let the content and the tech speak.” We’ve got the name, we have all this stuff that we’re doing, and the price stuff, it only makes sense when you’re actually going to be out marketing it and talking to consumers. If I’m talking about it now, other than industry chatter, it isn’t really meaningful for consumers. So, we’re just going to wait until closer to launch, let that news stand on its own, and by that time, hopefully, the buzz and the anticipation for the content is there. Otherwise, we would have just been talking about price.
IG: Is there any sense of maybe Microsoft wanting to see how the PlayStation Move would be priced out? Is this any kind of reaction to that?
AP: No, no, we’ve had that locked; we know what we’re doing. It’s easy to assume that news gets staged based on those kind of things. I’ve got questions, “Is the new Xbox 360 a reaction to the new PS3 Slim?” No, unfortunately, it takes a long time to build these things; we were doing this a long time before their product came out. So, no, it was purely a conscious decision to say, “We have so much stuff we need to get out just at this show;” I wanted to focus on the console, we wanted to focus on the experiences, and the name, and the pricing stuff will come.
IG: Speaking of the name, actually, I’m curious how that evolved from Natal to Kinect, because from a branding standpoint, at least, within the industry, so many people were laser focused on the word Natal and that brand was already out there. It even made appearances in the mainstream on Jimmy Fallon and stuff like that. And now it’s sort of a rebranding to Kinect when that other brand had already, in some ways, succeeded, I'd say. Can you talk a little bit about that evolution of the brand?
AP: Sure. Well, you know, we launched it as a code name. It’s always one of the challenges: once the name gets out and people kind of get over it or react to it, then it sort of sticks. Our intention was never to call it Natal. I mean... we thought about code names that might be more meaningful or could evolve into the product names, but Natal was actually the real code name. Again, Alex Kidman sort of heritage from him and Microsoft city names as code names. So we said, “Let’s just be honest and just call it what we’re calling it,” because you know it gets misinterpreted and it means different things in different languages. And it was really an industry thing. Yes, we got some mainstream press, but I feel like, again, we oftentimes forget that the consumer audience, the mass consumer audience, you know, they really get invested in things right before they launch and right when you’re about to sell stuff. So, we didn’t really see a lot of danger that people would be confused. The industry will figure it out right away, and we haven’t done any advertising, we haven’t done any of the marketing type of work. We tested the name, we actually did test Natal with consumers, and actually through all the testing this name [Kinect] won by a landslide.
IG: You mention the new Xbox of course is being shipped out. There was a story I read about how there’s no more red ring. If there’s any kind of malfunction (fingers crossed there won’t be), it's designed now not to actually have any of the red LEDs light up. Can you talk a little bit about the decision behind that and maybe talk a little about how hopefully the machine is so streamlined in production that we won't see hardware malfunctions?
AP: Well, you know it's unfortunate and, believe me, it’s my least favorite thing to talk about, part of our history. I think most people agree it’s become a little bit of an Internet meme now, just a thing to say. I feel bad for the customers that have had to go through the experiences that they've had, but, fundamentally, almost everybody will tell you that consoles purchased in the last two or three years, that problem doesn’t occur. It's really people that had launch consoles and some of the early hiccups in getting those repaired and back out to people. But really, our focus over the last few years has been continuous improvement and getting the existing boxes rock steady. The box that you bought a year ago or even two years ago isn’t really having a problem. I mean, when you sell 40 million of something, the hard part is that any part of consumer electronics, automobiles, even DVD players, which are about as commoditized as you can get, the nature of manufacturing means there’s going to be a small handful that have problems. For the most part, the overall quality problem has been fixed for a couple of years now. This is an evolution of that work. The decision not to put the three red rings in it was just because it’s something I want to put behind us.
3 Comments
June 23, 2010
Nice spin with the "we made it smaller because customers wanted it." Of course, Microsoft made the Xbox smaller and quieter as a side effect of cost-reducing it, since of course the whole impetus was to get the unit manufacturing cost down. Really, there's no need to stretch it by saying it was all, of course, for the dear customers that we love so much.
The comments about the Kinect were interesting, but it seems like an open question to me whether the Kinect is even capable of functioning in a game where lag is a crucial factor. If Microsoft really wanted to sell Kinects, either price it low where casual gamers are more likely to buy it, or price it high and appeal to hard-core gamers (bundling it with a Kinect-only Halo title, for instance). So far, they've neatly done the worst of both worlds: Priced Kinect high to avoid casual gamers, and shown no signs of being able to use it with hard-core gamer titles (if anything, the lag in the demos says the opposite). Which means a low adoption rate and an installed base not big enough to attract major development efforts. Maybe there will be some changes to this strategy (low cost 360+Kinect bundles? some killer Kinect-only titles?), but so far it doesn't look like a big winner to me.
June 24, 2010
I bought my Xbox 360 in April 2007 and it had the RROD two times, I wasn't the only one in my circle of friends, so it wasn't just a problem with the launch consoles.
The Xbox brand was never attractive to the casual audience and I doubt that Kinext will change that. It should have been a standalone project, that would have been more promising.
The Wii was a success because it was targeted to both audiences, WiiSports for the Casuals and Zelda TP for the hardcore gamers.
July 18, 2010
I had the RROD 9 times on my Xbox 360, I got it when it first came out. I already have this new console, and i must say, i think it runs alot better then its predisesors. I enjoy the fact that it also doesnt make much, if any, noise, which was a thing that bugged me about the old 360, and the fan is better places on this one as well. Which i had been a press member at e3 though, as they all got a free Xbox 360 slim , oh well.