A Microsoft job listing points toward the future of Xbox Live, and the key word is expansion: from consoles to mobiles and PCs, Microsoft seems set on taking its service to multiple platforms.
Microsoft wants to expand Xbox Live. That’s not a crazy or surprising idea. I think most of us assumed that the company does. Now the first concrete details about how the company wants to grow its successful service have emerged in the form of a job listing for a Live Community Director that suggests that Microsoft wants to merge Live with its other services to create a new “casual and social gaming platform across the Web, the console, mobile and beyond.”
Though the job listing is big on hypetalk and mumbo jumbo, it contains a few interesting tidbits. The main, general aspect of the job will be to “manage” the Live Engagement Team’s “LIVE community strategy and execution across a range of properties, from Xbox LIVE to Windows Mobile,” but a wide range of services are also mentioned, from “forums to social networking sites, from MyXbox to MSN Games.”
As Ars Technica notes, it sounds a lot like Live Anywhere, the buzz word for the Live expansion initiative that Microsoft was making noise about way long ago and really never changed anything. More immediately, however, it calls to mind recent remarks made by Shane Kim, when he was talking about the possibility of a mobile Xbox, and mentioned that Microsoft is “building a service in Live that will… will extend to other platforms.”
If that service is this “casual and social gaming platform,” it might be a lot less exciting than a mobile Xbox, but were you really expecting that to happen? Let’s just play some MSN Games and try not to think about it.
