In an interview with Engadget recently, Bill Gates spoke about his opinions of the Xbox 360, along with his comments on Halo 3. Apparently Mr Microsoft himself has been playing the 360 all Xmas, specifically PGR3, Kameo, Basketball and Perfect Dark Zero – games that he got his butt kicked at by a bunch of “kids”.
Bill commented about the shortages saying that they have “actually ramped up as fast as anybody ever has, but demand is still way ahead of [them]”
When Mr Gates was asked whether Microsoft are ready for Sony, he replied:
“Well, we think so. We’ve got a lot of things that they don’t know that we’re doing, so we’ll keep them on edge a bit. We think that this whole thing has become very software centric; that is, the toolkits that let developers do their best creative work — that plays to our software strength, as well as the idea of Live, where we had to learn a lot with Xbox 1, and the decision to require broadband, to go with VoIP, but we learned a lot about wanting to put things into the operating system so you can chat even while you’re playing the games, it’s really a level of richness that the games are built on top of that we didn’t have that last time. We learned how to do that, we learned about contests and spectators, and so this is really a second generation of Live for us. It’s very based on software expertise, so it will be interesting to see what Sony does in that dimension.
We also now have a situation where if your friend has already bought an Xbox and you go to buy something that you want to play with them, it’s not like last time where at his house you play his game and at your house you play your game. Now it’s all online, you’ve got your achievements and things, so it will be a fascinating competition.”
And now for Halo 3 – the only reason why you clicked this news article right?
Bill Gates surprisingly stated that Halo 3 may NOT be launched around the time of the PS3 launch. “I have to make sure that any speculation I did about that is — it’s up to the team when they want to ship that, and they’re going to take their time to make that a super great product. So even we don’t know when that will come out. That’s one of many games that are just phenomenal that are in the works, but it’s up to the artists to do it when they feel good about it.”
Quite contrary to the comments he made earlier in the year about Halo 3 being released with the PS3’s launch to steal some of Sony’s thunder.
To read the full interview, visit engadget.
