Former Xbox Corporate Vice President Peter Moore was featured in a lengthy interview on the Danny Peña podcast to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the Xbox 360 console. The executive, who also had prominent careers at SEGA and later Electronic Arts before leaving the industry, highlighted the different state of the gaming market nowadays and whether the Xbox console would still exist in the future.
What’s happened with the acquisitions made by Microsoft… I still say, look, if they had the choice, would they make hardware? No. They would be delighted if they could be a multi-hundred billion-dollar entity delivering content directly to the television, to whatever monitor you choose to play on in the classically Netflix model, if you will. You just select who’s playing this? 5,000 people playing this? I’m going to jump in right now, no latency, no lag, you’re in. There doesn’t need to be a box between you and your controller and the TV set. 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, 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.
I’ve been gone from the industry for eight years. I left EA to go to Liverpool in 2017, so it’s been a long time. Do I yearn for the old days, do I look back fondly when things crop up in my social media feed, like this was you 15 years ago and you see great photos of things in E3? Yeah, but I think we as an industry then positioned the industry for where it is now. It’s different. What Microsoft is doing is no longer the ‘we’re going to get as much content on Xbox, our singular platform, and the PC and we’re going to fight for that, we’re going to pay for that, and we’re not going to give it to anybody else’. Those days are clearly over, as you can see.
Moore’s opinion is not that much of a revelation, given that Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella plainly stated in the past that the goal with Game Pass was to create a Netflix-like game subscription model. However, that objective was met with a crash course against reality over the past few years, marking stifled growth for the subscription service even after massive games like Starfield and Call of Duty joined Game Pass from day one.
It appears that gamers do not really want a Netflix-like model. However, Moore’s musings still have relevance as Xbox fans fear for the future of their console now that Microsoft has elected to publish all their games on formerly rival platforms, like Sony’s and Nintendo’s consoles. In that regard, there is a chance Microsoft eventually won’t deem it worth it to make any more Xbox consoles, especially if the downward trend in sales continues unabated.
