‘I did encourage the battle’: PlayStation vs Xbox console war was ‘healthy’ but has lost its feistiness, Peter Moore says

Former Xbox executive Peter Moore says the Xbox vs PlayStation console war was “healthy for the industry”, but that things have changed.

In an interview on Danny Peña’s YouTube channel, Moore was asked about Xbox‘s current strategy of releasing its first-party games on other systems, most notably PS5.

Moore – who joined Xbox in 2003 to help it compete with the PS2 and GameCube, then oversaw the launch of the Xbox 360 – said that in that era the concept of ‘console wars’ was a good thing for the industry, because it kept each side in the public eye.

According to Moore, the mainstream press previously “blamed all of society’s ills on video games”, saying that they were “a waste of time, creating violence, blah blah blah, all of that”, and that “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”.

Moore was notorious for appearing at shows like E3 with game tattoos, such as his Halo 2 tattoo (used to announce its release date) and his Grand Theft Auto IV tattoo (used in an attempt to convince the public that GTA was now associated with the Xbox brand). Moore says these and other PR stunts were necessary at the time for helping to grow the industry.

“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,” he replied. “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.”

Today’s situation, Moore stressed, is different, and while Microsoft continues to make Xbox consoles, he thinks it would stop doing so and focus on games if it could, but that there’s still a public appetite for buying hardware.

“If [Microsoft] had the choice, would they make hardware? No,” he explained. “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 added that while he understands that Microsoft’s intention is no longer to get involved in console wars, he says he feels some of the “feistiness” has gone as a result.

“The acquisition of Activision Blizzard changed things, I think – not I think, I know – at Microsoft,” he said, “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.”