14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft's Chief Financial Officer Dennis Durkin is quite proud of the first-party games released by his company and its partners for the Xbox 360, saying that, in terms of sales and quality, they have trumped exclusive games for rival platforms like the PlayStation 3 or Nintendo Wii.
All current platforms have had some extremely impressive exclusive titles, from Microsoft's Halo, to Sony's Uncharted or Nintendo's Super Mario Bros., but there's only one console that's the real winner, at least in the eyes of Microsoft, and that is, surprising to almost no one, its own Xbox 360.
According to the company's CFO, Dennis Durkin, Xbox 360 first-party titles have sold the most units and become the most critically acclaimed titles.
"I would ask you to go and look at some of your data, just to compare first party performance over the course of this lifecycle, because I think our first party performance in terms of quality bars and units per title this shift has been superior to our competition's," Durkin told Industry Gamers.
The website quickly took a look at the Metacritic average rating for games published by Microsoft's Game Studios, which achieved a score of 75, and compared it to Nintendo, which got 77, and Sony, which earned 74.
Durkin continued, however, saying that first-party games not only manage to sell lots of titles, with franchises like Forza Motorsport or Fable shipping millions of units, but also, through the new Kinect franchises, showcase where third-party companies should go.
"But 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. 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."
While Durkin may be extremely confident in his company's Xbox 360, all platforms have received a lot of quality first-party titles, so, in the end, many gamers were treated with quality experiences no matter their preferred consoles.