INTERVIEW PART 1: Andy Coughlin on Xbox and smartphones

MCV recently got a chance to speak with Andy Coughlin, recently appointed Retail Sales and Marketing Lead at Microsoft Australia, about Xbox's integrated future.

How do you see the Australian market reacting to Xbox hardware? How do our sales trends and curves differ from what you've been accustomed to?

Coming from America, I'm able to really see the differences between one mature market and another. Australia really is nothing like America at all. Specific to our business, my point of view is that we're similar, but I also think that (and this is going to sound really strange) Australians are just now embracing digital entertainment because culturally, Australians enjoy being outside. 

They enjoy taking a run, they enjoy being out and walking etc. So I think the opportunity now makes it more interesting for Australians to not just sit and play games, but have an entertainment experience that's actually quite interesting. Whether that's with Kinect or with the applications of voice, I think that's a real reason to do it, rather than just 'Hey, I wanna go play games'."

So certainly there's a gaming market out there, but there's a really good value proposition out there now.

There was a recent study which showed that games detract from other screen time, but not from time spent outdoors. The market for active indoor entertainment was arguably found by Nintendo with the Wii...

Agreed.

...however it's also fair to say that the Kinect has a fairly unique audience of its own.

Absolutely. That did happen. But now, for us, there is no controller, and the ability to use your gestures and voice to control your experience is a leapfrog technology.

Do you think the diverse range of experiences available on 360 designed to keep more people in households which already own 360s turning their machines on to increase buy-in when the brand releases a new console, or are they value-adds designed to sell more consoles to households without them?

It is about the experience. I think that the experience that the Microsoft is bringing to life, certainly on the Xbox, is continuing to evolve. Today, you can get into the experience for a somewhat insignificant price, and what we do is just build onto that. So what that means is that it's as little as you want or as much as you want.

What does playful learning mean to the children of the house? I don't know, but it's just another reason to experience Xbox. It's voice, it's gestures, it's movies, it's television etc. In this generation, it's all about that.

But I think that even in this generation as we start to think about what the future of that experience looks like, it's bringing that experience across multiple devices. My Windows Phone here is beautiful, and what it does is bring those experiences to life, whether it's Zune music or movies, if it's my Xbox experience I had a few hours ago. I think it's bringing this experience to the phone and to the PC and to the Xbox.

Xbox is the only which really allows us to do that, however, because it's on your favourite (and biggest) screen. You want to do more things on that big screen, regardless of what that is. How do you bring that across multiple screens?

As the children in a family grow up and the kids become teenagers, they're less likely to play games with their parents. Does the Xbox have a place, similar to the Windows 7 advertisment with the dollhouse cross-section, for servicing multiple people in the home at once in its future?

Yes, yes! And it goes both ways. We're quite fortunate, in that we've got PCs which can stream movies around the house, and there are a lot more PCs in people's homes than there are Xboxes, but they all talk to one another.

Even today, I stream content from my media server to my Xbox. So I would envisage that at some point, everything's fairly ubiquitous. Microsoft being a software company, you can bring that ability to almost any device.

There'll certainly be Microsoft products, but if you've got a laptop in your room you can certainly be doing similar things based on what's happening on the Xbox.

If you're on the bus or transit system and you want to play a game you've just played on your Xbox 360, you can do that on your phone.

According to DANZ12, of the 9 out of 10 households which currently have a device for playing games, 43% also play games on their smartphones. How specifically can Microsoft push into that space?

As far as I know, this is our mobile gaming device here: the phone. I think Apple's done a great job in that space. We have our wins here and there.

The thing that Microsoft is doing now that we'll talk about later, particularly with Nokia, will lead to millions of people being able to have that Xbox or gaming experience on their phones. As we continue to evolve and mature as an ecosystem, you're going to be able to have those gaming experiences when you want them, where you want them and on what device.

EA is saying almost precisely the same thing, when they talk about their new mobile services for their games.

Yeah, it's happening. And I think one of the really great things about Microsoft at this point is having the partnerships that we do.

Peter Moore [EA COO] used to work at Microsoft, so I have a relationship with him and he's an amazing guy, and we've got these great relationships with EA, with Activision, with Ubisoft, with all these different publishing partners.

I think it's our job to give these guys the toolset to deliver (in the long term) one set of code, and have it work no matter what screen you want to play it on - that's the vision. But I know that Peter had said up at E3, that today you're still kind of building for the phone, for the browser, for the big screen, but I think at the moment we've got an amazing set of tools to do that with.

XNA is a great platform, so I think we're in a good space.

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