PlayStation Vs Xbox War Was ‘Healthy For The Industry’ Says Peter Moore, Who Admits To ‘Encouraging The Battle’

Speaking during an interview with Danny Pena’s YouTube channel, Peter Moore, former head of Microsoft’s Xbox division and ex-Sega executive, revealed that he consider the PlayStation vs Xbox console war ‘healthy’ of the industry, but noted things have long since changed.

Moore departed Sega in the early 2000s following the demise of the Dreamcast to join the Xbox team, where he was involved in the original Xbox and its successor, the Xbox 360. While admitting he did encourage the console war — Moore was noted for various PR stunts like tattooing himself with logos for GTA IV and the Halo 2 release to push the Xbox brand — but noted that the “feistiness” has since gone.

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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.

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.

Moore began his video game career at Sega during the Saturn days and eventually became president and chief operating officer in May 2000 after Sega of America’s Bernie Solar was fired. He clashed heavily with the company’s Japanese arm though, and in January 2023 joined Microsoft, where he stayed until July 2007 to head up EA’s spots division, before leaving the games industry in February 2017 to start a career as CEO of Liverpool FC and later joined up with Unity.

[Source – YouTube via VGC]