Durkin: Xbox 360's first-party titles are "superior to our competition’s"

Xbox CFO Dennis Durkin believes Microsoft Game Studios' system is "superior" to Sony or Nintendo, due to the first party performance "in terms of quality bars and units per title."

Speaking with IndustryGamers, Durkin said the firm's first-party developers even "pushed our platform team to build a better platform."

"Certainly we think first party is an important tool and you can’t dispute titles like Forza, which has consistently come out on a repeated cadence and sold multi-million units," he said. "You can’t dispute things like Fable, which again, on a very consistent pace, has come out and sold 2 and 3 million units a pop.

"And now new titles, like Kinect Sports, which has come out and sold over 3 million units. So we are, not only building existing IP and incubating around titles like Halo and others, but really building new IP in new areas. And that’s going to be core to us... to build those experiences and monetize those.

"Our first party team really pushed our platform team to build a better platform. So a lot of those experiences, those new entertainment experiences, actually look a lot like gaming experiences in terms of how the functionality and the interactivity actually works.

"And so first party has multiple roles in terms of our ecosystem, in terms of driving platform-exclusives, but also communicating to partners what’s important."

When comparing Metacritic ratings of first-party development studios, MGS has a rating of 75 compared to Nintendo's 77 , SCEE/SCEI's 74 and SCEA's 73.

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