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Mar 18 / Ozymandias

Write Once, Optimize Anywhere

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MIX is over (whew!), and as I write I’m on the flight back to Seattle. It’s been an amazing show for Windows Phone, and I just want to say thanks to those of you who swung by the booth to chat! It was great showing off the device in person and answering questions, and I look forward to doing much more in the future!

Our big announcements at the show were around the release of the Windows Phone Developer Tools Preview. Those tools feature…

  • Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone
  • Windows Phone Emulator
  • XNA Game Studio 4.0

… and are available right now as a free single download at http://developer.windowsphone.com. If you haven’t already grabbed them, I highly encourage you to do so. I think you’ll be surprised at how easy it is to get up and going – just yesterday a MIX developer was showing off a full-fledged stock ticker tracking tool he’d whipped up as an experiment.

Being the cloud gaming guy, I’ll point you to some of the other Windows Phone development for more details on the tech side. For one, Charlie Kindle has a great summary on his blog here. And as always,you should absolutely keep an eye on the rest of the WP7 development team. You can follow the team on Twitter @wp7dev, or individually: Charlie Kindel (@ckindel), Shawn Hargreaves (@shawnhargreaves) , Michael Klucher (@kluch), Loke Uei Tan (@lokeuei) and Christian Schormann (@cschormann).Obviously, you can also follow me as @Ozymandias on Twitter, and if you need my blog address we’ve both got a problem. ;)

That done, I wanted to talk about some of the implications of these announcements from a cloud gaming perspective. We’re in the early stages of rolling out our cloud gaming story, and how that relates to Xbox LIVE. Make no mistake: Xbox LIVE is Microsoft’s cloud gaming service, and I’ll be writing a lot more on our plans here in the future. But I did want to follow up with some thoughts following MIX.

The key point to consider is that in today’s world it takes a combination of hardware, software, and services to make the magic of cloud computing (and cloud gaming!) tick. This is a crucial point – you occasionally see attempts at painting a cloud gaming story that include one or two of these components, but fall flat because they miss legs of the stool. After MIX I think it’s clear that we have all of the building blocks necessary to build a robust connected entertainment ecosystem.

We have hardware that spans all screens (TV, PC, Mobile); we have the cloud services connecting them (Xbox LIVE and Azure), and finally, with our recent development tool announcements (Silverlight and XNA Game Studio) we have the development ecosystem that spans all of these devices, and allows developers to create and deploy connected experiences across these devices more easily than ever before.

We recognize every platform and use case is different. Although the buzz term of “write once, sell many” sounds great, the reality is that some work almost always needs to be done to take advantage of the differences in each platform’s input methods, display surface, and use case. You can see this in action with the tech demo that Luma Arcade built with The Harvest. This demo was done in three weeks, and reuses 90% of the code across the Xbox 360, Windows, and Windows Phone. Of course, some code had to be changed; where a controller could be used on the Xbox, the developers needed to create an input system for a touch screen on the phone. Interestingly, in this example, the art resources were simply used as-is on the phone – the high-resolution screen allowed for a seamless port. And of course, having a unified API via XNA allowed the title to award achievements on all three devices without a single change.

As we move past MIX we’ll be talking a lot more about how titles can use our cloud gaming services to easily create rich, connected experiences. We are working hard to make it easy for developers to enable these experiences in a way that will allow gamers to connect, play, and socialize seamlessly wherever and whenever they want. But we’re also making sure to take into account the inherent differences between platforms, knowing that a “cloud gaming” experience on one device is necessarily different than on another. A simple example of this is our focus on enabling seamless, asynchronous connected gaming experiences at launch. I’ll write up a post at some point about why we chose to focus on this aspect initially, but rest assured it all comes down to creating a seamless, user-driven experience that’s appropriate to each platform. Just as The Harvest demo changed its input paradigm as it moved across platforms, so we are focusing on enabling the appropriate sorts of cloud-connected, social gaming that you expect.

Will be writing much more in the coming months on all this. But first, time to get home, walk the dogs, and get some sleep!

Related posts:

  1. How Do I Use Xbox LIVE APIs on Windows Phone?
  2. Windows Phone 7 UI Design and Interaction Guide Updated
  3. Questions about Windows Phone? Find me at MIX10!
  4. [Engadget] Windows Phone 7 Series: everything you ever wanted to know
  5. The Three Pillars of Xbox LIVE on Windows Phone
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  • http://csdprojects.co.uk/ Alex Atkin UK

    The problem with all this is I feel its too little, too late. I used Windows Mobile for 3 years after hearing the promise of Xbox Live on it, but it never happened and I have left Windows Mobile for more friendly pastures.

    Xbox Live on your phone would have been amazing, had it launched earlier in the Xbox 360 lifespan when the PS3 was worthless and we had far fewer Arcade games so being able to play Pac Man, Hexic, Bejeweled 2 etc on PC, Phone or Xbox all for the same price* and unlock achievements across three. But now, there are too many Xbox 360 games, ones which work across all platforms would be a minority so it cheapens the idea.

    I realise there are licensing deals to think about, but I can’t help feeling we needed this 3 years ago. Its going to take something really amazing to pull me back to Windows on my phone and I don’t think Windows Phone is going to be it, sadly. I spend a lot more time on Linux these days and am not willing to sacrifice PC usage scenarios on my phone for the sake of some gaming. Gaming on my phone would be nice, but its the lowest priority application.

    * I feel Game Room is flawed about this, it should be a single price not cheaper for Xbox only play as then what happens if I have loads of Xbox Only versions then decide I want to be able to play on PC and/or Phone too?

    If I then have to pay an upgrade fee or buy the game again to enable this, it breaks the whole concept of buy once, play anywhere. It should be one fee, period, or else its little better than the current situation where you have to buy it separately on every device you play it on.

  • http://ozymandias.com Ozymandias

    @Alex: Thanks for the comments. It’s important to remember these are early days, but one thing Microsoft is very good at is listening to what consumers want. You’ve got some great ideas here, and I’ll hope that as we keep rolling out our thinking you’ll find sufficient value to entice you back! :)