Former Xbox boss Peter Moore is concerned that young people will choose to use smartphones for gaming instead of consoles.
Former Xbox boss Peter Moore is concerned that Gen Z will choose to game on smartphones rather than consoles
The 69-year-old executive oversaw the launch of the hugely popular Xbox and Xbox 360 consoles during his stint as Microsoft’s vice president at the company’s Interactive Entertainment Business division from 2003 to 2007, but he now believes that Gen Z will want to play games on their phones rather than using gaming specific hardware.
During an interview with IGN, he said: “Gen Z is coming through and they're going, ‘Why do I need to spend four or 500 bucks on a bespoke piece of gaming hardware when I've got my smartphone, or I got my PC or my Mac, and I can do things there with a pretty decent controller?’
“So I think that's what we're facing. In particular Microsoft is thinking, ‘Are we now finally ready for cloud gaming? Are we finally ready to just crank on our 8K television, get in our gaming menu with 10,000 games available? Who's playing what right now?’”
Moore revealed that Microsoft was trying to predict the future of gaming as early as 2007, and were beginning to think about when the popularity of “bespoke” gaming consoles would fall out of favour.
He said: “The broader picture — and we certainly feared during my time even at Microsoft — we were saying then, in 2007, ‘Is this the last console generation? Do televisions start to come with chips that can play games and you just need a controller? Is the PC, as it was then, a renaissance?’
“And why do you need a bespoke piece of hardware that costs us, Microsoft, billions upon billions of dollars to install, and you hope to hell you get an attach rate of software and something out of your Xbox Live, your connected service, that would justify the losses, the haemorrhaging of cash that hardware costs you?”