In a closed door interview with Microsoft's Corporate Vice President and XNA Chief Architect J Allard at X05 two weeks ago, we saw something different in the man behind the system. It was a first for me. Allard loosened up. He dropped the sales shtick. For him, a man whose brain moves about 20 times faster than the average human and whose vision for the Xbox 360 is impressive and encompassing down to the last detail, loosening up meant showing frustration, disappointment, even a little anger. It meant laying down some jokes, answering questions with a direct, even raw tone, and, perhaps more than anything, it meant being brutally honest.

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The behind-closed-doors interview session took place near the end of day two at X05, which meant Allard had been answering the same questions all day. When we sat down with him, the usually energetic, buoyant Xbox 360 brainchild, gave us a glimpse behind the scenes of the Xbox 360 operation, and behind his normally well-guarded rhetoric. The interview took place with a mixed group of European and American journalists, including GameSpy's Will Tuttle, Game Informer's Andy McNamara, Team Xbox's Rob Sempsey, OXM's Rob Smith, yours truly, and one really "interesting" European "journaliste."XNA Studio Package will come out next year. It will have more influence on how people will design their games then. We're having marginal influence right now.We're seeing little wins right now with XNA. The PC-enabled game controller, for instance. The audio tools we've put together for Xbox 360, so you can demonstrate games on your PC. I would say we're seeing little wins right now, and the bigger wins are coming in the future. But all that said, look at what id Designer John Carmack said in the video last night, "Finally a console system that has better design tools then the PC." He's saying, "I'm trusting the game that helped build my company, Wolfenstein , to Xbox 360 as a primary development platform." I'm hoping that says something. I hope it says something that we're doing something right in the software space. But I'm not complacent about it at all, I consider that a little win.Well, we've got to do better on compression. We're not totally where we want to be with compression. Honestly, to be frank, stuff comes in hot. We're trying to do a worldwide launch of this very ambitious program, and developers will tell you that they're not very satisfied with the DVD emulator or compression. And therefore they are layouts with DVD, they're struggling with that; they're cutting corners. Basically what happens when you get final hardware late, you're sloppy. With all deference to the developers, you've got to take every out you can and so they're not applying all their talents, as they will next year and the year after to get every little bit they can out of it. They're being a little sloppy with the CPU, they're being a little sloppy with the discs, they're being a little sloppy with their formats and compression to make launch. And next year, you'll see that they tighten that up so they can get more out of the system using the same disc capacity, using the same compression, and the same art tools, and so they'll get a lot more out of the system next year. That's why games look better year over year. It's primarily because hardware comes in hot, and developers use the deficiency of the schedule not to just learn the hardware but to cut a couple of corners.We'll see. Well, obviously I think Xbox Live Arcade is really important. Bigger games are hard, you know. You take music, and you say, music is one size of content, and you take movies, and you say, that's the next size of content, televisions are in the middle as well, and games are the biggest content you'll ever download. But we talk about, "Will I buy Halo 4 online exclusively online?" I don't know. I don't think about it that way. I think about the marketplace as a place to have a real friction-free relationship with a gamer where you can say, "Hey look, try the trailer on your TV." If you have a 23-inch high-DV TV, a 12-inch, a black-and-white rabbit-ear TV, or a 75-inch, cutting edge, state-of-the-art plasma TV, enjoy the trailer, enjoy the demo in the setting that you're used to. Not at a kiosk at retail, not a month after the game is already on stores, but the day that Activision is ready, Boom! You can play it on your TV set. And with bandwidth restrictions, the hardware size, which is practical to offer, and digital rights and all that, trailers and demos are about the right size for people's patience right now. So I think it starts there.