Speaking to CVG, Shane Kim, corporate vice president of Microsoft Game Studios, spoke on the subject of the first Xbox’s sudden demise, and whether the same will happen to its currently high flying console. Is the love for a console limited to its lifetime or will the 360 still rule some time from the grave like the PlayStation 2 is doing right now?

As Kim points out, the point of the first Xbox was never to win the console war. Microsoft lost some 4 billion US$ on the Xbox project, and although that was entirely expected and calculated in order to get a much needed foothold in the console market, it was sour money to continue running a lost race. Hence Microsoft had more or less dropped Xbox support even before the 360 was launched, and third parties had no trouble doing the same right away. Competitor Sony has always had good traditions of supporting its previous generations for years to come, and has expressed the intent to do the same with the PlayStation 2, but considering they are actually making a profit of that machine’s sales and the installer user base is several times larger, they have a tad more reason to do so.

With the Xbox 360, Microsoft is no longer using licensed third party core components, and is the sole owner of the ’silicon’, most notably the design of the CPU and GPU. Most importantly this means that every profit to be made from better yields, die shrinks through higher precision and architectural improvements, are for Microsoft and not Intel and nVidia as with the first Xbox. Therefore Microsoft will be able to keep supporting and manufacturing the Xbox 360 for a long time after the Xbox 720, or whatever it’ll be called, hits the market. And if Shane Kim, as chief MGS, has anything to say in this, they will:

“If we could have a PS2-like tail, that would be awesome for the Xbox 360. I don’t think you’re going to see the same abrupt move to the next-generation,” Kim says. “We’ll have a much more balanced approach when the next-generation arrives.”

The public promise to support the 360 even far beyond its successor’s arrival should be a relief to those frustrated by 2005’s sudden neckshot to the first Xbox.

Thanks to Lotus111s for submitting this article.