XBLA chief trash talks Sony and Nintendo's offerings
Greg Canessa, the Xbox Live Arcade group manager, has plenty to be proud of in the Arcade service. We're awfully fond of Geometry Wars, Street Fighter II: Hyper Fighting will be huge, and we expect plenty more in the coming months and years. Hopefully Canessa isn't too proud...
When asked about Nintendo's forthcoming Virtual Console service, opening up the entire back catalog of Nintendo titles to Revolution gamers, Canessa poo-pooed it saying, "A lot of those Nintendo games, you know, aren't gonna hold up." And this differs from XBLA hits like Joust how? There are hundreds of classic Nintendo games that will hold up fine; don't count on Super Metroid disappointing anybody.
Canessa may join Sony in underestimating Nintendo's hugely popular properties... but not before he slams them too. Confronted with Sony's pie-in-the-skyambitious online plans, Canessa responds, "If Sony is trying to come at us, you know... 'good luck.' It's going to be really hard for them. It's just a huge engineering challenge, and beyond the engineering challenge, it takes a long time to build a community."
We can't help but agree with Canessa on this point, but he should take a cue from Peter Moore: "You never underestimate the power of your competition." Moore understands that, no matter how great XBLA is, Sony will have no problem selling PS3s.
[Thanks, m3mnoch]
