Fri, Oct 02, 2009 | 20:06 BST

Microsoft “could” be working on video capture for Xbox 360

xbox360logo

During TGS, a unnamed developer was asked by Kotaku if the firm was working on video capture in it’s game – or something like what Halo 3 has.

“We’d love to have video capture in our game, but why work on something that the platform holder is already developing,” said the developer.

To get more clarification, the site asked Microsoft’s Scott Austin, director of digital games at Live, if this was indeed the case.

As expected, the answer was a windy “no comment”.

“We are always thinking about ways that Live at the platform level can make games better,” he said. “I’m not going to comment on video capture, but you can assume we are thinking about ways to make things more interactive. Interactivity used to mean things like multiplayer, now you see more cooperative things in games.

“We want to have better quality and more immersive experiences. We are always looking to innovate. When innovation becomes table stakes we want to move forward. We want to make all entertainment services more rich with our live services.”

4 comments

ecu
02/10/09, 8:17 pm

I wish every game could have this feature, I spent a lot of time with it in Halo 3. Seeing it for the first time was one of the few truly jawdropping moments in gaming that I can recall.

It’d be great for football games, if the entire game was recorded. Then you could edit the highlights yourself and save your best games, rather than just your best goals.

Aimless
02/10/09, 8:57 pm

I very much doubt you’d see a blanket implementation of a Halo 3-esque system as… well, I’ve no doubt it would be a technical nightmare and it would still be functionality that would need to be in some way integrated by the developers.

There’s a fair few PS3 games that allow players to record footage and export it to the XMB/YouTube so something like that might be possible to integrate into the 360′s Dashboard so it could be used in any game, but even then you run into technical and legal issues; if the video is of a decent quality then how much of a performance hit is it going to make, are games companies going to be happy with Microsoft allowing every 360 user to record — and, presumably, share — potentially damaging footage of their products, etcetera.

theevilaires
02/10/09, 8:58 pm

I wish MW2 had this feature for PS3. A number of titles support it like Hawk and Rag Doll Kung Fu.

theevilaires
02/10/09, 9:00 pm

Aimless I can’t even copy stuff from an external HDD to the NXE dash so coping game captures I would be shocked