Welcome back. We had you in 2014, wow, also for our 1000th episode, five years ago, and now our 20th anniversary episode here. 20 years, congrats, man. Like, you were there. When did Paris start? So 20 years, how many years after did you come in?
I didn't officially become a part of Gamertag Radio until 2013, but we were friends and would collaborate together as early as like 2006. So good, congrats guys. Just really... no, I mean, what you've meant to the community, people look to you in many different ways, as you know, but really I just think balanced voices in an industry and a community we all love. So thank you, thank you for all that you've done.
Yeah, thank you. This year's episodes, I uploaded stuff I recorded a long time ago, and I just uploaded the launch of the 360 and Zero Hour with Peter Moore and J. Yeah, Paris has the hoodie of the Zero Hour. I have that same one.
Were you there at Zero Hour?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. You were? Okay, yeah, yeah. 'Cause I went with my buddy. This was obviously before podcasting or anything. I was just excited. I won the contest to go, so you know, we drove down to Palmdale and man, like 20, 24 hours just playing all those games. It's just a moment in time I'll never forget.
Yeah, such fantastic moments. It's just really good memories.
Yeah, actually, so Phil, let's talk about that. Very quick, you know, with the Xbox 360, what are the lessons learned from like... Zero Hour?
Good team to be part of, and make sure the teams are enabled to do great work. I think that's fundamental. I think with 360, we did a nice job trying to get games from many different places, even funding games obviously from Japan. You think about Blue Dragon, Lost Odyssey. I was somewhat in charge of those and getting those done. I think that was important, being able to try new things. I mean, it's never lost on me. We did connect in the 360 generation. Not getting stuck in how people define stuff today, but being able to take some risks and try things. Not everything will work out perfectly, but I think about it like those... we used Gears and we were looking at Gears of War, and the difference in texture quality that we could get with different RAM setups in the console. And that loop of really letting content, games, kind of drive the definition of the platform. What are your creators seeing? What are they saying? That's just fun for us on the platform side, making sure our creative voices are helping define where we're going.
Paris, you may not even remember this, but the very first time we got the chance to talk to you in 2014, I said my first thing was like, 'Yeah, I don't like Connect.' And looking back on that in hindsight, I mean, that was probably a crazy thing to say to the CEO of Microsoft Gaming at the time. But it was the fact that you being the head of Xbox all this time is... in my opinion, have probably been one of the most accessible gaming CEOs we've ever had in the history of gaming. I mean, so how important is that for you to directly know, engage with the community, and talk to them, and hear what they have to say about where they think Xbox is headed?
Yeah, it's how I learn. It's how I stay balanced. Like, I'm sitting here in my office in Redmond, Washington, and I know that not all gaming happens here. Not all gaming happens with the controller in my hands, getting online, playing with friends, playing with people I don't know. Listening to what people are interested in, and even taking the negative feedback and things that people don't like. Like, that's always a place that people will bring up. But I think it's critical. I can't always do... have with you two, which we see each other on air sometimes, see each other off air a lot of times, and you guys are always very straight with me about the things that you see, what questions are coming up in your head. And I just think it's really, really important because it's so easy to kind of get trapped in just my own lived experience, especially as someone who plays a lot. So it's just critical to me in the role that I do.
Yeah, I know one of the things I loved about Xbox 360 at that time was there was a lot of... I think you guys started having more relationship with Japanese studios. Yeah, at that time, and I'm glad to see that it's coming back. I think one other conversation we were having, Paris, right when we have Phil, was you know, the relationship with Japan and...
Here I was just over there. Memories. So, how's that been, man? You know, since last time that we had you on the show till now, with you know, working with more Japanese companies now?
I feel great about our relationships with the publishers in Japan specifically that you're asking about. And it's taken a lot of flights, a lot of FaceTime, a lot of listening, as Paris was asking about, making sure I'm hearing their feedback. But I think about like Metaphor last year and our partnership on that game. It's probably my game of the year last year. The work that we've done, as you said, with Sega, with Square, being on stage with Square a couple years ago was a ton of fun. But I mean, yesterday with Ninja and being able to... the Koei Tecmo work, the Team Ninja work, having Platinum involved. I mean, gaming is a global business, it's a global art form. Different people with different perspectives telling their stories on screen, and us getting to play... like, what could be better than that? So it was one of the things we started early on in my career in this role, at least, of getting on planes, getting to Tokyo, getting to Osaka, getting to Kyoto, talking to creators, listening. And I love to see the progress that we've made. There's more work to do, no doubt, but I think it's what the Xbox community deserves, and I want to stay focused on that.
Yeah, absolutely. And I'll just say on a quick side note, Game Camp is something that Xbox has done. I actually just saw a video that came out about detailing all that Xbox Game Camp has done, and it is exactly your point about enabling the next generation.
And I want to talk about this. This is an Xbox... this new marketing thing that you have. But I want to put it in this context. So a year ago, you had the business update and you talked about the four games and putting that out there and learning from it. So obviously, you have definitely learned something because we're now seeing things like Indiana Jones going to PlayStation 5. We're seeing, you know, Doom: The Dark Ages obviously day and date on PS5 as examples, right? But you've also talked over the past year or so about more open platforms as an example. Obviously, you know, no red lines with some of your portfolio, things like that. And I'm leading that into this is an Xbox in your interpretation.
So it's... devices out there. Some of the platforms are closed. They don't allow everything that we do to show up on those platforms. The thing that I've learned and continue to learn when I'm listening to creators, not only our own studios but other teams building games, is every creator out there wants to build a game that can find as many players as they want. And frankly, there aren't many platforms out there that try to build connections to people on so many different screens. It's almost like single platform, single device, single game, and that's kind of the history of our business. And we're really taking an approach of we want people to be able to play Xbox on many, many different screens now. Not every experience will be the same. We obviously love the native experience we have on our own platform and our own hardware. Handheld PCs, whether it's on phones, I want everybody to be able to play on Xbox. And it does mean more of our games shipping on more platforms. Not just PlayStation. We love the work that we do with Nintendo, we love what we do with Valve on Steam, and that's going to continue. We'll just continue to do more of it because what we learn is put the games first, make sure the games can be as great as they can. We love the experience on our own hardware, our own platform, but our games will show up in more and more places, no doubt.
If I can follow up really quick before we go to you, Danny. So along those lines, because again, one of the concerns that I hear in the community is about your own hardware and the future of that. Now, I know Sarah has stated, yes, we will continue to have Xbox hardware in the future, technical leap, things like that. What is going to be the reason for me to want Xbox hardware when I can get that experience on another platform?
