Ars Technica has a fairly in depth interview with one of the developers from Microsoft’s Game Technology Group, Matt Lee. In his words, his job “is to help game developers make better Xbox 360 games.” There are a ton of technical details in the interview, ranging from improvements in the Altivec units on the PowerPC cores, CPU multithreading issues, and procedural world generation.

Somewhat interesting are the perspectives on the video game market; as a developer, the marketshare statements might not hold a lot of weight. Bandied about is the 10 million unit head start, as if that were fact at this point. With the PS2 outselling the Xbox 360 in May, and an average of 250,000 Xbox 360 units sold by month, if Xbox 360 sales remain the same for the rest of the year, that targets an additional 1.5 to 2 million Xbox 360s in the United States; Europe might add a similar number, and Japan’s sales will be negligable. Add to this the fact that Wii and the Playstation 3 ship in November, and Sony’s marketing machine will be intense. So 10 million sounds good, but is probably as optimistic as Microsoft’s original holiday projections for the Xbox 360. Saying that “Both the Japanese and US markets are reaching saturation at this point” may have some weight in that there aren’t a lot of ways to incrementally add new gamers, but the existing core gamer demographic is still a battle to be fought every generation. Add to this the strong drives that Nintendo is making with its “Blue Ocean Strategy” in all three territories seems to indicate the opposite; that there are new opportunities, just not in the standard game development genres.

Lee also takes some time to discuss the PS3 architecture. Given that he probably doesn’t have a Sony NDA signed or a development kit, he’s probably working off much of the same information as the general public. There might be some insight he has talking with developers experienced on both platforms, so the commentary is interesting from that light. Porting from PS3 to Xbox 360 and vice-versa will be difficult, Lee predicts, but that’s hardly a revelation; the original PS2 and Xbox consoles saw some spectacularly bad cross-platform ports in their day, most notoriously with some of Midway’s releases. The Xbox 360’s unified memory architecture may be somewhat of an advantage, but its hard to tell at this point. It is, however, interesting to get a technical review through Microsoft-colored glasses.