Does the Phantom Live?
written by Coury Turczyn on Tuesday, June 07, 2005
Infinium's President and COO Kevin Bachus Defends His Phantom Console From Critics Who Doubt its Existence
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Given the company’s controversial history and the high risks involved in such an undertaking, what personally drew you to get involved with the Phantom?
This is the product I’ve always wanted. I want something I can hook up to the television, hook up to broadband, and get access to thousands of games. I think that it’s something that’s not only exciting to me as a gamer—that I can get access to games that aren’t available at retail anymore, games that never came to retail, imports and things like that, without even leaving the house—but also I think it’s really important for us an industry, in a couple ways.
The first is that if you look at the film industry and compare it to the video game industry, it has a couple of advantages. The first advantage is that every studio makes a tremendous amount of money off of their library, films that they have released in the past that they then release on television or come out of home video. That doesn’t really exist in the game industry. Games have three, maybe four months of retail, for the most part, and then they’re gone. You find them in the bargain bins or on eBay, but you basically can’t get them anymore. I think that by having a service like this, we can put up games you don’t have to invest in building a physical inventory for, so we can give not only the consumer the ability to find these games, but the publisher the opportunity to make those games available on an ongoing basis.
The second thing that’s important is that if you look at the film industry, there are a lot of people who don’t consider themselves film buffs, but who go to movies. That’s probably the bulk of the audience for a movie. If you look at the game industry, though, most people who buy games would consider themselves gamers. But there are a lot of people out there who like games, who were gamers at some point, but who just don’t have the time to dedicate to it as a hobby. For them, the opportunity to have a service like this that has lots of games—games that are perhaps more relevant to them than they would have been when they were 18 years old, games that they don’t have to hunt down, games that they can try before they buy them—could be something that brings people back into gaming.
Nobody else is stepping up to do this. Sure, Infinium has its share of challenges and skepticism, but who else is stepping up to do this in the way that we are—putting together the hardware and the service, and the retail relationships? There are people who are doing bits and pieces of it—there are on-demand services on the PC, there are obviously game consoles in the living room—but to give gamers what they’re really looking for, requires a much more holistic view of the whole problem.
You’ve been at Infinium for a year and a half now. Are you personally satisfied with the progress you’ve seen at the company in that time?
I am. Of course, that said, I’m like anybody who does a project or anybody on our team: I would love to be able to do everything faster and better. Like anybody, we make mistakes, and we learn from mistakes and change direction to make a better product. So, gee, it’d be great if I could go back in time and never have gone down certain paths with the product or with marketing or with the funding for the company. But considering where we are right now, I’m probably more excited than I’ve ever been at the company. Everything has really kind of come together in the last several months—the product is here and it works, the relationships with the publishers are there, and I’m really excited about talking about our relationships with retailers and the final pricing and the launch date and that kind of stuff. That’s kind of the ultimate test of a project: Where are you now and how do you feel about it at this moment in time? Because if you go back and constantly second-guess yourself, you never really get anywhere.
What’s been your biggest hurdle on the project?
Probably funding. It’s really hard for people who haven’t started a company and raised money to understand how challenging it is. It’s really easy to say that good ideas get funded, and bad ideas don’t. But that’s just not the way that it works. We created this company specifically to go build this product, to go and do something that we wanted to have and enjoy and share with other people. And it’s been challenging not just because of something specific related to the company, but just the whole process of raising a lot of money. It takes a lot of money to build something like this. It takes a fraction of what it took to build Xbox, but it’s still a lot of money. The fact that almost all of the money we’ve been able to raise has gone directly into developing this product is something I’m very proud of.
The Phantom was originally scheduled for release for the 2004 holiday season, but got postponed. What happened?
There were two things that happened. The first was that our retail partners were very adamant about the fact that the holiday season was going to be very crowded with a lot of products, and with a lot of competition for advertising. Think about it—last year we not only had Christmas but also a presidential election. So getting billboards and getting television ad space was very difficult to do last year. They actually used our own research to show us that people by and large, when we talked to them about the Phantom service, are interested in buying it not as a gift for somebody else, but as something for themselves. Retailers told us they look at Christmas as a gift-giving opportunity. So they were saying, “Why are you guys focusing on this? Why don’t you come out at a time that’s a little less crowded?”
We were rushing really hard. I was really fortunate—I have the pleasure of working with the strongest engineering team I’ve ever worked with. And these guys I believe would have shipped a product on November 18 of last year. But taking the extra time has allowed us to build a better product, to build stronger relationships with retailers and publishers, to make sure we that we came out when the conditions are right in the marketplace, and have ultimately have a stronger and better product as a result. It’s always beneficial to do that, even on Xbox. I think very few people know that we actually put a plan together initially to get a product onto store shelves Christmas of 2000 to compete with PlayStation 2’s launch—to be out the same time as them. It was actually Bill Gates himself who told us that it was more important for the introductory product to be noticeably better than the competition than to be out at the same time. This was before we had announced the product, so that was again something nobody ever saw. Ultimately, Xbox is what it is because of that extra year, because the technology advanced and the product became better and there was more time to build games. It’s always disappointing, because I’d love to have people playing with the service and learning from that experience already, but we’ll have a better product when it comes out.
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