By Peter Moore, the former Xbox executive who joined the company in 2003 and oversaw the Xbox 360 launch, says that the console wars were good for the industry years ago – but times are different now.
In an interview with Danny Peña’s YouTube channel, Moore was asked about Xbox’s plans to release its first-party games on PS5 and sometimes Switch too.
Moore explained that the concept of ‘console wars’ was a good thing for the industry two decades ago because it kept them all publicly visible:
“The early 2000s was a phenomenal platform for us to get off the back pages and to get on the front pages, and to be taken seriously as an entertainment medium.
We needed to do a ton of missionary work in those days, and at the same time we were young enough to have fun, and do all the daft stuff that we did, and all the stunts.
I think the console wars that you’re kind of alluding to were healthy for the industry. Look, I’ve said it before – certainly, I did encourage the battle, because I think gamers loved to see Xbox versus PlayStation, maybe Nintendo as well, and that I think was a rising tide that lifted all ships.”
That’s no longer the case these days because he thinks Microsoft would stop making consoles and focus on games if it could, however, there’s still a public desire for console hardware:
“If [Microsoft] had the choice, would they make hardware? No. Would they be delighted if they could be a multi-hundred billion dollar entity delivering content directly to your television, to whatever monitor you choose to play on? You bet.
You know, the classic Netflix model, you just select – ‘Who’s playing this? 5000 people playing this? I’m going to jump in right now, no latency, no lag, you’re in, and there doesn’t need to be a box between you and your controller and the TV set. But still, you know, consoles are – as we’ve seen particularly with Nintendo now – people love their hardware.”
Moore suggests it was ultimately Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision that changed things and has essentially taken the fight out of the ‘console wars’:
“The acquisition of Activision Blizzard changed things, I think – not I think, I know – at Microsoft, and so this is not the old days of the console wars, and punching each other, and trying to steal customers and trying to get market share and build your attach rate. This is bigger than that in an economic sense. Has it lost a little bit of the feistiness that the industry I think fed upon and grew upon? I think so, yeah.”
These days Xbox is doing away with exclusivity entirely, Nintendo is chugging along doing its own thing as it always does, PlayStation remains focused on titles that hopefully win awards and acclaim, and PC has become a viable option for many gamers.
Source: VGC
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