Microsft Cut Half of NXE Features

CVG had a chat with Microsoft's head honcho on Xbox Live in Europe, Jerry Johnson, in which he revealed that half of the original feature set envisioned for the New Xbox Experience was "cut out" along the way. According to Johnson, we'll still see at least some of these features delivered via more frequent, seamless updates to the NXE.

Johnson told CVG that there's "still a lot of stuff we want to do" and that "half of the things we wanted to do, we cut out of the service." One of these things was "a Photo Party app that will be part of the platform," he revealed. Using it as an example of the face of updates to come, Johnson said, "The way it will be distributed is all of a sudden you'll see a slot on the dashboard and if you don't have it you click on it and it's going to download from the service onto your application part of the dashboard. Those are the type of things we're going to start doing."

The Primetime channel, which will house various multiplayer, social-focused, live "game shows," will be delivered in this manner in spring 2009, Johnson confirmed. It had originally been slated as part of the NXE launch, before joining the list of things that were nixed.