Peter Moore knows a lot about making video game consoles. He was Chief Operating Officer and President of Sega of America from 1999 to 2003, the man behind the Xbox and Xbox 360 at Microsoft from 2003 to 2007, and Executive Vice President of EA from 2007 to 2017. (You may remember him for his (possibly temporary) Halo 2 And GTA IV Tattoos, which is completely fair.) Moore has since left the industry, but the former gaming star still has a lot of big thoughts about the state of the gaming industry. In a March 8th IGN interviewMoore speculated that we may have reached the end of console gaming as we know it.
Read more: EA’s Peter Moore: ‘We Can Do Better’ (and Aren’t the Worst Company in America)
When asked about the stagnation in the console business, Moore said that they are currently at a crossroads. Microsoft is invest a lot in cloud technology, seemingly in anticipation of a future where gaming-specific hardware is no longer a necessity.
“What you’re now seeing and certainly hearing from a company like Microsoft is: Is the cloud replacing the need for custom hardware? Is streaming changing the way we game on the devices we’re now used to, especially smartphones? I don’t think people are playing less, they’re just playing differently,” Moore explained. “And you’re increasingly seeing a generation coming up that isn’t prepared to sit in front of the TV for an evening and watch whatever the game is that week.”
Moore mentioned that he has been having this conversation with industry colleagues since 2007. But this time he seems more convinced than ever that the industry is increasingly becoming fully digital and that even in little black boxes under your TV, this will soon be a thing of the past. While he says Microsoft is already well on its way, PlayStation is the shoe he’s waiting to release. “Sony is primarily a hardware company, so I would say it is your barometer company. Microsoft, not so much,” says Moore. “But I think it’s a really serious question that’s being asked in Tokyo, in Redmond, Washington, in Kyoto. That’s what everyone’s working on right now because when you start next [hardware] “You have to be prepared to absorb billions of dollars in losses.”
These comments come at a particularly interesting time for Microsoft. The company is reportedly preparing for a mid-cycle release Xbox Series X/S update It will be a fully digital system later this year. Some recent big budget Xbox games, such as the recently published one Alan Wake 2 and what is to come Hellblade II: Senua’s Saga, are not or will not be available on physical media. It’s obvious that Microsoft is betting its chips on a digital future, but with a Nintendo Switch 2 coming and Sony’s post-PS5 plans uncertain, the gaming console market could look very, very different in just a few years.
