Microsoft’s Bach talks up Zune gaming

Robbie Bach, president of the Entertainment & Devices group at Microsoft, has spoken to VentureBeat about the Zune’s potential for gaming.

"We think of [the Zune] more as a portable entertainment player. The point of demoing games is to show that games can run on that entertainment platform. We didn’t demo games running on some big service because there isn’t some big service to announce," he said.

"The idea is that Zune does music, video, photos, and it has the hardware to do very compelling games on it. It is more compelling than an iPod because it actually has a d-pad. From a gaming perspective, it is reasonably well suited. You can read a little or read a lot into it."

It was announced at this year’s GDC that the 3.0 version of Microsoft’s XNA Game Studio would support the development of games for the Zune, including capabilities such as custom soundtracks and ad-hoc wi-fi multiplayer. For more on the topic click here.