Opening the annual E3 game conference here, Microsoft executives announced a deal to distribute films from the Walt Disney Company on Microsoft’s Xbox Live Internet service and outlined a broader array of games focused mostly on children and families.
Executives predicted that the company’s recently announced plan to spend up to $1.15 billion to fix defective Xbox 360 game machine would improve, not undermine, the system’s image with consumers.
“The important impact for us is that our customers know we’re going to support the console and support them and if they have issues, we’ll take care of it,” said Robert J. Bach, president of Microsoft’s entertainment and devices division, in an interview. “It won’t change what’s happening in the marketplace because the industry is about the games and we think we have the games that will get people really excited this year.”
As the game industry’s growth has slowed in recent years, game developers have tried to reach beyond the young male players who have been the target audience.
“We believe we have the best game lineup in video-game history for the holiday season,” said Mr. Bach. “You can look top to bottom and we think we have the goods to please any type of gamer.”
Part of Microsoft’s strategy has been to position the Xbox 360 as a living room media hub and an essential element of that plan has been allowing users to download films and television shows to the machine. Adding Disney to the roster of companies distributing movies and video programming over the Xbox Live service should help broaden the appeal of the game system to families with children.
The same could be said of the new games Microsoft announced here, including a new installment of the company’s Viva Pinata game and a version of the Scene It? board game. Scene It? will come with a new controller for the Xbox 360 with large buttons and a simple layout that game novices, intimidated by a traditional game controller, may find easier to use
“Part of our strategy is we want to win this generation and in order to do that we have to expand beyond the core gamer audience that we’ve had success with and that means appealing to the broad consumer market,” said Shane Kim, general manager of Microsoft Game Studios.
The company also said it was developing a keyboard for the Xbox 360 controller. Currently, Xbox Live users send text messages using an on-screen keyboard. The company recently announced plans to integrate the popular Windows Live Messenger service with Xbox Live.
But even as Microsoft hopes to appeal to new sorts of users, the company wants to avoid neglecting the serious player. So Microsoft also said that the next version of the popular Resident Evil series from Capcom of Japan would also be designed to run on the Xbox 360.
In the past, Resident Evil games have run only on Nintendo and Sony consoles. Persuading Capcom to develop games for the Xbox 360 underlines the success Microsoft has had recently in attracting Japanese developers who had shied away from the American console.