Originally Posted by 1up
1UP: At the Sony conference yesterday, Epic announced a multi-stage deal with Sony about various things, starting with optimizing the Unreal Engine 3. They announced that Unreal Tournament 3, originally an Xbox 360, PS3, PC game, is now at least a timed exclusive for the PS3. But, something that was a very big bullet point and something Epic's talked about far back with UT is the mod space. At the last TGS, Tim Sweeney, Epic's CEO, said they were frustrated because everything Sony was telling them was that the platform was open, but Sweeney was quoted as saying they were frustrated with Microsoft because it was a closed network and Microsoft wasn't open to user generated content. When, and if, UT3 arrives on 360, how are you going to address that huge feature difference?
Kim: Yeah, it is - on one hand. In general, a) we're bringing user generated content to our platform. Look at what's happening with Forza Motorport 2 with the auction house and the livery editor, that's just taken off huge. It's not the same kind of user generated content model that Epic is going to do with UT, but it is user generated content. We have just as much interest in that space as anybody else, but I will tell you that there is a lot of value to managing the service and system the way we do on Xbox Live, versus the wild, open, supposedly open PlayStation Network. You're going to have to be very careful about what happens and we'll see how much responsibility the platform holder actually takes there in terms of managing that stuff.
It's not unlike Sony PlayStation HOME. It's great to talk about all this, but assuming you could even build it, one of the biggest challenges is actually managing the behavior. We have a lot of experience doing this on Xbox Live and that's part of the value proposition we bring to our customers, is that you're going to have a great experience on Xbox Live and we take care of a lot of problems for you and don't just say it's the responsibility of the publisher of the responsibility of the community to manage this. We take accountability, we do that as the owner.
Same thing's going to be true in user generated content. We're going to have user generated content, I'm not worried about that. I know what our plans are in that space, but we're going to do it in a way that works really well for customers.
1UP: The way I understand it, there's going to be a filter. It's not unlike YouTube. You create the level, you submit it, it goes through a filter and then goes up. On a basic level, if that's how it worked in Unreal Tournament 3, would the Xbox platform be open for doing something like that, leaving the control to a third party?
Kim: Eventually, you're going to see more and more stuff like that. I'll take another example: XNA Game Studio Express. That's to enable people to use Game Studio Express to create more and more of this casual type of content, but it's all created by the community. You don't have to be a professional game development studio to use Game Studio Express, we're going to figure out how to expose that content to end users but we're going to do it very carefully. The last thing we want to do is have Xbox Live flooded with all of this content that's not usable or not high quality or is offensive or whatever, but that's just our approach.
We're going to take responsibility as the platform holder, we're not just going to say "here's some filter that the publisher has created," and, of course, you're relying on the publisher to do that and different publishers have different ideas of what's acceptable and what's good. We're saying, look, as the platform holder, we're really going to try and own that and make sure it's a good experience on our platform, and we'll see whose approach works better for customers, but we're sticking with what we've done because it's been very successful for us.
