So much about Kinect lies in the experience. You can’t quite tell how good or bad it is by watching someone else play. So around launch will there be opportunities for the general public to try Kinect out and let them experience it first hand?
Yes, Kinect is an experience-based buying decision. In fact, it’s so experience-based that if you play it once, you’ll want to go buy it. We’ll be doing three things. One is we will have people like yourself come and try it out, write about it, and go out and tell people about it. Secondly, we took a decision a while back that all our marketing will either be in retail or online. So at retail, we’ll have a huge number of demos happening all over. Third is online. Everyone who has or wants to buy an Xbox or Kinect is online, so that’s the best medium for us to target those users; may be through social networking. So these are the three ways in which we want to spread the word on Kinect. Do not expect to see large television advertising.
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So no more of that?
Well, when I came into the business about two years ago, we did a fairly large consumer study of gamers and would-be gamers, and we found that Xbox is an iconic brand. It has an extremely high recall value of 67%, and 66% had an intention to buy an Xbox 360. So with this, above-the-line advertising is a waste of money. There was some great advertising at launch and that did its job. The job now is what I just mentioned; we’re focussing our energies in the retail and online channels.
Will we have Kinect here in November when it launches everywhere else, or will there be a delay?
We will launch it at pretty much the same time. But sometimes there are shipping delays, and other logistical issues; or may be we might decide to bring it around a festival season. So there could be some delay, but it should be more or less simultaneous.
Will there be a console-Kinect bundle here?
There are many different options, and it’s for us to choose which ones we bring here. If it makes sense for India, we’ll bring it here.
Coming to the games; at launch and for a long time after that as well, there was fixed pricing for first-party games, but these days the price keeps fluctuating from game to game and very often a price is announced and then a day or two before release, the price is changed. What’s the reason for these price fluctuations?
There is a reason for that. We have control over first-party pricing. We can gauge market demand and the potential for a particular game, and price it accordingly, so we can have special pricing for our games.
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A long time ago, the Classic/Platinum range of games was introduced in India, but that catalogue hasn’t been updated in a long time. Why is that?
Well, there’s two angles to that. Yes, there is a growing list of Platinum titles, both in terms of first and third party games. Whether third party Platinum games come here is not in our hands. Coming to the first party titles, we are now consciously growing our games library from a Kinect launch angle and the new Xbox launch angle, so you will now start to see much more game-related activity happening. This is the biggest year for Xbox.
Microsoft has provided exemplary support since day one where the Xbox 360 is concerned. But it’s been over three years since launch, and those who bought the console at launch have run out of warranty. So is there any sort of support plan for these consoles?
We are trying to bring in some sort of AMC (annual maintenance contract), which will give you extended warranty. I think very soon we will have that out in the market, and we’ll be able to tell you more about it once we do. Meanwhile, we’ll be very happy if you buy the new Xbox (laughs).
What does the current Xbox 360 install base in India stand at?
You know, I was going to ask you. The problem is I can only estimate based on how much I sell. With the duty structure that we have, there are far more Xbox’s that come in through the grey channels. There are some third-party estimates from NASSCOM, FICCI, etc who say that there are 1 lakh to 3 lakh Xbox 360s in India. The exact figure is anyone’s guess.
So what’s your best estimate then?
I would say it’s certainly more than 1 lakh.
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