Xbox Live Server Protocol Opens Sports To Sega, EA?

Thanks to IGN Sports for its interview with Visual Concepts boss Greg Thomas regarding Sega and EA's entries in the Xbox sports game market. Thomas, whose Sega-owned company produces the ESPN Sports series, reveals of the Xbox versions: "Last year we had to be in [Microsoft's] closed network. This year, they're introducing something called LSP (Live Server Protocol) that enables us to run our own servers." Following Microsoft's cancellation of its 2004 XSN Sports line-up for Xbox, he muses on Electronic Arts' possible, long-delayed adoption of Xbox Live for sports titles, noting that LSP "...allows you to use your own servers. So if that was EA's problem, then they can definitely be on Xbox Live this year. But if they had a different problem, a billing issue or a revenue concern, then that hasn't changed." He ends by predicting of EA: "we're clearly expecting them to be on Xbox Live by the end of the year."

Comments

I really hope so.

[Lemental]

Having just two football games, one sucking, the other being really awesome, is bad for competition. ESPN has owned this segment of the Xbox market for a year now, and maybe we will finally get to see some REAL innovation in these titles in the future.

EA may be a big behemoth, but, they have real talent in spots, and, I hate to see that talent confined to one system, or, one online service for that for one system.

Re:I really hope so.

[cassidyc]

unfortunately the "real talent" only exists in companies that EA have bought before it sucks the creativity out of them.

CJC

God MS are smart - even if it takes them a while

[sien]

So, MS realise that EA will not be part of XBox live. OK, they say, we made a mistake, we will deal with it.

Add to that Xna, where MS turns the 40% of the game market they control ( 30% PC 10% Xbox ) and you wonder how long before they bury Sony.

Scary really.

He's probably wrong.

[fondue]

"we're clearly expecting them to be on Xbox Live by the end of the year"

EA have made no announcement regarding LSP.

Visual Concepts have signed a potentially lucrative deal with MS to continue supporting Xbox Live. So Greg Thomas is hardly going to say 'no, the Live revenue model is still completely unworkable for EA and all the other major publishers, but on the other hand we're getting our asses kicked by EA on the PS2 and we're really, really desperate.'

The changes made by LSP don't address the fundamental problems with how Xbox Live is organised and run.

Open Live Servers

[HuggybearVT]

Doesn't this just open the door to Open Source Xbox Live servers, a la Battle.net? It seems that this would be a very popular hack. Methinks that's why MS wanted to keep control of the closed protocol.

Re:Open Live Servers

[FubarPA]

I don't think this would be possible with a stock XBox, because there is no way to tell the XBox where to connect. On a modded XBox you may have the capacity to do something along those lines.

Re:um... exclusive contracts out the window?

[Londovir]

To the best of my knowledge, I don't think there is any exclusivity contract between Sony and EA over their online sports line. I think it only is exclusive right now in the sense that "you can only play online with Sony because you can't play online with anyone else", not "you can only play online with Sony."

I think the biggest roadblock is a major revenue/royalty beef between EA and Microsoft. Microsoft expects to receive compensation from EA for allowing the use of their servers and XBox Live network in order to play EA Sports online. EA, on the other hand, feels that their EA Sports branding and license is powerful and lucrative enough to warrant receiving compensation from Microsoft for all the sales of XBox Live subscriptions that people will be buying [and renewing] because of their presence on XBox Live. As a bigwig in EA said in a web site interview I saw somewhere, "HBO wouldn't let their hit shows air on public TV without compensation, so why should EA allow their hit games on other systems without some sort of compensation?"

If they can get onto their own servers, it takes one aspect off the table. If they can reach an agreement on the other issues, we probably will see games on XBox Live this year. I think the decision would have to have been made by now, though. Usually sports games come out right in the midst of preseason time, and developers will need a good amount of time to get the quirks out of the system before it goes to beta test. Since EA hasn't worked with the XBox networking system yet, I imagine they'll want to make sure they get it right - so time is clearly of the essence. If they're going on Live, we should hear something soon....