In what is clearly an unbiased statement made during the promotion of the Sky Player on Xbox 360, Xbox LIVE Europe General Manager Jerry Johnson told VideoGamer.com that their console has the best games and first-person shooters, even with its moves to broaden its appeal.

"I'll come back and say that Xbox has the best games out there," he said. "It's got the best first-person shooter games out there. The exclusives we've had over the past years and what we had going into this holiday prove the point that this is still very much at its heart a gaming console."

"There's nothing we're going to change with that," he adds. "You will start to see us, though, do things that are broader marketing and start to expose some of the things that are broader than just first-person shooters."

And one such way of broadening the market for Xbox 360 consumers is the Sky Player, which allows users to stream content from the Sky Sports network. This, Microsoft hopes, will make the machine known for more than being "just a Halo or Gears of War machine."

Perhaps with Nintendo and its perception among much of the "hardcore" in mind, Johnson gave assurance that they would not be moving away from the core gaming experience fans have come to know and love the machine for.

"Trust me, I think you'll find people operate in different modes," he said. "My wife doesn't like the fact I game sometimes. I'm still going to go game sometimes. There's nothing we're going to change that's going to not focus on those customers more. In fact, not just this year but in the next year, we'll continue to do features that are targeted at that hardcore gamer. At the same time we are going to start to do things that appeal to both the hardcore gamer and the broader user, and continue to do things and start to do more targeted at the broader user specifically."

VideoGamer.com notes that the "best games" comment comes during a time when the PlayStation 3 seems to be on a roll, thanks to critically-acclaimed fare such as Uncharted 2, in addition to well-received first person shooters such as Resistance and Killzone 2.