[The Game Business] Peter Moore Interview: When Xbox took on PlayStation and won

Brigandier said:
They won 3rd place out of 3? Wow well done MS!!! They won a billion dollar loss on RROD extended warranties and redesigning the console.

I loved the 360 at the start of that gen and they took online console gaming to the next level but let's not fool ourselves the PS3 had a mega resurgence when they released the slim and finished strong with games like TLOU.
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If we were to spin it, we could say Microsoft got a sort of victory over Sony in the early years of that gen.

Microsoft had all the goodwill on their side. The 360 had over a year head start and was a lot cheaper than the PS3. Sony really messed up the PS3 with launch with the price, delay and some might argue the decision to go with the Cell processor. IiRC, a lot of third party games looked better on the 360 than the PS3. Sony's PR was at a all time low. Remember the Wii60 movement?

However, after all that, Microsoft still managed to come behind Sony when the generation ended. The games dried up, the RROD hurt them and they wasted too much time and money on Kinnect.

Sony also managed one of the greatest come backs in video game history.

Microsoft gave Sony a bloody nose at the beginning. That's about it. Sony still ended up in a better position when that generation was over.
 
Coloress_Kafka said:
If you are purely looking at sales figures they didn't win, but there's no question that Microsoft had way more wins with the 360 in terms of software than Sony did with the PS3.

Pretty much every 3rd party game ran better, they nabbed a bunch of time exclusives, and the online service was light years ahead of PSN.
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They were extremely competitive. Their best years imo.
But at best case scenario for MS, that generation finished with a tie.
 
ValiantInstance said:
What they did was the equivalent of AMD going from their current market share to competing with Nvidia, but on a bigger scale. People saying 'but PS3 won' are missing the point that beating the Playstation outright should have been impossible.

And then they threw it all away with the Xbox One.
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100%
Look at console sales of the ps2. Amazing. Then compare this to the number of ps3 sold. Poor. Do the same for og Xbox vs the 360.….
 
It was an absolutely incredible launch. Everything clicked in place. Industrial design. UI. Games. Launch marketing. Brand name and branding. The most flawless marketing execution along with PS2 and Switch 1.

Edit. Also Wii was flawless
 
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Deerock71 said:
360 had an impressive stretch of monthly NPD victories that the Switch eventually overtook.
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Switch? You mean the PS4? Or you mean they had the record streak that switch beat?

Chittagong said:
It was an absolutely incredible launch. Everything clicked in place. Industrial design. UI. Games. Launch marketing. Brand name and branding. The most flawless marketing execution along with PS2 and Switch 1.
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Bizarrely the 360 didn't perform very well during its launch year.
 
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Three said:
Switch? You mean the PS4? Or you mean they had the record streak that the Switch beat?
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The 360 had the longest stretch of consecutive months in North America which has ONLY been topped by the Switch. I think it was like 18 straight months, if memory serves correctly, which was damn impressive.
 
Great interview, Peter Moore is really understood the products he was selling, and what the market wanted. Definitely a key player in Microsoft's success in gaming. It proved Xbox was not just a Halo box, and a legitimate platform.

I found this part at the end really interesting:

"It was such a different vibe and environment for me, from being a president of Sega America, and bluntly fighting with my Japanese overlords on a regular basis. To being right in the middle of the decision making.

"There was nobody at Microsoft other than us that were making decisions. Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer allowed us to get on with it… and we'd check in with them. They both had a great interest, Bill in particular, in what we were doing. But they also allowed us to be off-campus. We were not part of what's known as the Borg. We developed this camaraderie. It was refreshing to be part of that and not having to look around for somebody to make a decision. The decision was ours."
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This was during the time where Microsoft considered Sony a platform threat. Meanwhile Nadella had Phil Spencer (and Xbox as a whole) on a leash the first few years of his tenure, finally let go of the reins (around 2018/2019), and yanked it right back due to the ATVI acquisition and changing economic landscape. Third party exclusives were cheaper, easier, and most important - faster than building up first party studios. Nowadays third parties need a larger audience to scale their sales, so we see exclusivity deals mostly going away. It's also not a quick solution considering how long it takes from concept to shipment.
 
Back In The Day Throwback GIF by Gogglebox Australia
 
Its funny how Kinect in a way caused the downfall of Xbox.

Motion controls weren't a fad, remember? If you claimed this in 2009 or so you would get blasted for it. But what happened is that MS went all in on Kinect, and it was even the most succesful peripheral launch ever. It was even on Oprah lol. But something was off I found. They sold like 8 million in its first few months, and then after 2 years it was at 10 million?

Anyway. Motion controls were a fad after all. The Wii drop after 2010 was unprecedented. So much that PS3 and 360 ended up in whisper range of it in terms of units shipped. Nintendo banked on the Wii name with the Wii U, and had their biggest failure ever. The brand wasn't that strong it seems.

MS ofcourse, went all in on Kinect from its launch onward. Core games and support dried up. Gamers abandoned them. While Sony, who released Move as some sort of second fiddle, had a good back half with the PS3 and ended the console with a string of good software. Enter the 8th gen. Sony continued focusing purely on games. MS still pushed Kinect, jacked up the price with 100 bucks. MS were heavily beaten and to this day never recovered.

There are some what ifs here. What if MS continued what they were doing with 360 before Kinect. What if the likes of Peter Moore weren't replaced by hacks like Don Mattrick. Xbox One would have a sure fighting chance esp. in the US and Series would likely be in a better position. Phil called the 8th gen the worst gen to lose, you could call it bullshit because consumers simply purchase whats good and popular. But on the other hand I did go PS5 by default because of the extensive PS4 library I owned after those 7 years. Taking an Xbox as second console, perhaps, but not replacing it.
 
Good reminder that even the PR disaster that was the $499 / $599 PS3 managed to outsell the Xbox 360 on its first full year on the market, 2007 (YTD), and that the latter was at its peak when riding the motion gaming wave from the Wii when the Kinect was new in 2011. We all know what happened to Nintendo once the fad was over.
nial said:
I mean, they did certainly right in NA and the UK, which is were the bulk of sales came from, but it certainly doesn't make much sense that they only managed to be neck and neck with a console that was a PR disaster from left to right. Compare the consoles' sales and you will see:

2005:

Xbox 360: 1,5M unit sales (November 22, 2005)

2006:

PS3: 1,7M unit sales (November 11, 2006)
Xbox 360: 8,9M unit sales

2007:

PS3: 8,7M unit sales
Xbox 360: 7,3M unit sales

2008:

PS3: 10,7M unit sales
Xbox 360: 10,8M unit sales

2009:

PS3: 12,4M unit sales
Xbox 360: 10,2M unit sales

2010:

PS3: 14,4M unit sales
Xbox 360: 12,1M unit sales

2011:

PS3: 14,1M unit sales
Xbox 360: 14,9M unit sales

2012:

PS3: 11,8M unit sales
Xbox 360: 10,1M unit sales

2013:

PS3: 7,6M unit sales
Xbox 360: 7M unit sales

Both consoles had similar sales between their respective launch window + first year periods of 14 months (10,4M unit sales), while PS3 had a better respective launch quarter, despite missing the EU market. PS3 then went on to outsell the Xbox 360 in 2007, 2009, 2010, 2012 and 2013, while the Xbox 360 only managed to outsell the PS3 in 2008 (by 100K unit sales) and 2011, which was the peak CY of the console at 14,9M unit sales, thanks to the Kinect boom.
I often see people claiming that Microsoft managed to take advantage of Sony's fuck-ups, but nah, I don't really see it; at least not on a global scale. Isn't it quite sad that the Xbox 360 only managed to overcome its undeniable decline on the market and get to new heights thanks to riding the casual wave generated by the Wii, you know, the period where people usually say that Xbox lost its direction?
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Nydius said:
One billion dollars spent fixing the RROD issues that generation because they put design aesthetics ahead of actual engineering.
So much winning!

How Microsoft spent $1 billion on a simple mistake with the Xbox 360 - Business Insider (2015)
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Not quite.

It was because of a last-minute change of the rules in EU that required lead-free solder. The console PCBs were not designed for it, and so the heat dissipated from the chips would eventually cause the solder to soften and the chip's connections to fail.
 
TheThreadsThatBindUs said:
Not quite.

It was because of a last-minute change of the rules in EU that required lead-free solder. The console PCBs were not designed for it, and so the heat dissipated from the chips would eventually cause the solder to soften and the chip's connections to fail.
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In the book Race for a new game Machine which chronicled things from IBM's side MS was so preoccupied of having a lead time over Sony that shipped knowing this flaw full well. Also documented how they got to steal a lot of research from Sony as they got the PPE core Sony had financed the development of.
 
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LavitzSlambert said:
Great interview, Peter Moore is really understood the products he was selling, and what the market wanted. Definitely a key player in Microsoft's success in gaming. It proved Xbox was not just a Halo box, and a legitimate platform.

I found this part at the end really interesting:



This was during the time where Microsoft considered Sony a platform threat. Meanwhile Nadella had Phil Spencer (and Xbox as a whole) on a leash the first few years of his tenure, finally let go of the reins (around 2018/2019), and yanked it right back due to the ATVI acquisition and changing economic landscape. Third party exclusives were cheaper, easier, and most important - faster than building up first party studios. Nowadays third parties need a larger audience to scale their sales, so we see exclusivity deals mostly going away. It's also not a quick solution considering how long it takes from concept to shipment.
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I've said it before but the man is a walking W. If MS had any sense they'd oust Phil and beg Peter to come back and make Xbox cool again.
 
harmonize said:
The only reason anyone can say Playstation beat the 360 with a straight face is because enough time has passed since that people don't really remember how dire the PS3 years were. Scrapping by on unit sales because developing and undeveloped countries that spend noticeably less on software preferred the PS3 and calling that a win is laughable when even the head honchos at Playstation admitted they couldn't afford another generation like that one with the PS4.
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Remarkably ignorant.

The PS3 is actually the point where Sony began to get itself and developers actual software money in my region, prior to that people bought illegal copies as a way of life.
 
Xbox 360 had an amazing few years whilst Playstation were fumbling around with the launch of the PS3. Shame that Microsoft couldn't keep the momentum and ended up focusing resources on shite like the Kinect, which was a massive waste of time.

By the time Killzone 2 dropped, I was mostly playing on PS3. Then it was Uncharted 2 and many others that I was more interested in. I ended up selling off my 360 by the time 2011 rolled by since there just wasn't much I was interested in, plus the online for PS3 was free, so it was a no brainer to just play my online games there.

The one thing I disliked about the PS3 was the mandatory installation of most games, which took fucking forever. Especially MGS4, what a nightmare...
 
Calverz said:
100%
Look at console sales of the ps2. Amazing. Then compare this to the number of ps3 sold. Poor. Do the same for og Xbox vs the 360.….
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Still see the sales numbers of ps360 and think it's both success and failure depends of the company perspective it's not surprising to see collapse the xbox.
 
Karim said:
Still see the sales numbers of ps360 and think it's both success and failure depends of the company perspective it's not surprising to see collapse the xbox.
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I don't think so. I don't think sony looks back at the ps3 as a success. More like a misstep they learned from at the time.
 
Calverz said:
I don't think so. I don't think sony looks back at the ps3 as a success. More like a misstep they learned from at the time.
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I said the exact contrary. For Sony ps3 is failure and for MS x360 a success with the same comparable numbers. Just that make think why is ended like this today.
 
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I got a 360 the day Gears launched and PS3 just didn't interest me at launch. The 2007 lineup is honestly one of the best ever, completely spoiled for choice both in terms of first party exclusives (Halo 3, Crackdown, Forza 2, PGR4…) and third party timed exclusives (Bioshock, Mass Effect…)

I ended up waiting until late 2008 to get a PS3 (grabbed one with MGS4, LittleBigPlanet and WipEout HD)

Over the course of the generation I started playing PS3 more. MS would lose Bungie and Epic and their franchises suffered, the focus on Kinect just made me lose interest.

Sony had a great comeback in the second half of the generation with games like Uncharted 2, God of War III, Journey and Last of Us, big multiplayer like GTA5, LA Noire and Portal 2 also started running better on PS3.
 
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