Peter Moore, a former Xbox executive, has reflected that "Maybe it's all my fault, developing the console wars and getting in each other's faces." His confession offers a candid look at how one of gaming's most defining dynamics was deliberately constructed to capture the hearts and loyalty of millions of fans.
Before entering gaming, Moore ran marketing for Reebok, where the shoe giant was losing ground to Nike and other competitors. That battlefield taught him something crucial about consumer behaviour. From his experience in the sneaker wars, Moore learned that you "create this sense of competition, and the consumer loves it because they think they're soldiers in a battle."
When Moore joined Microsoft in 2003 to help launch Xbox, he brought that playbook with him. Moore was a corporate vice president at Microsoft during the original Xbox launch and through the Xbox 360 days. Before Xbox, he worked at Sega and helped launch the Dreamcast. Microsoft's leadership recognised what he could do. Steve Ballmer told him: "We don't have people like you." Ballmer had seen Moore on stage at Sega "throwing punches."
The strategy worked. Moore later reflected: "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."
Yet Moore is candid that the gaming landscape has fundamentally changed. He notes that "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."
Microsoft has indeed changed course. Starting in 2024, Microsoft began releasing ports of its first-party games for the PlayStation 5 and Nintendo Switch, with Spencer saying this was part of Microsoft's plan to focus more on the reach of its games across a wider range of devices. New Microsoft Gaming CEO Asha Sharma has taken the helm, with the company reaching over 500 million monthly active users and continuing to innovate across gaming hardware, content, and community.
The manufactured rivalry Moore created served its purpose: it energised an industry, gave fans something to rally behind, and pushed companies to innovate faster. But the calculus of modern gaming has shifted. Hardware sales matter less. Subscription services and cloud access matter more. Exclusives are secondary to ecosystem reach. Moore's confession is not a mea culpa so much as an acknowledgement that the original strategy, however effective, belongs to a different era.