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Peter Moore: The Final Console Generation, MS going Third Party, and MS debated putting the original Halo on PlayStation

Drell

Member
streaming will catch up to be non noticeable in ping time as compression and speed grow.
That's not how it works, ping is induced by the distance your data has to travel from and to your device. Except if we begin to build data centers next to every town, you won't have this low ping for everyone. Well except maybe if we manage to make data travel faster than the speed of light someday.
 

Mr.Phoenix

Member
Is it me or does this guy sound stupid? He's said some things and has some takes that's got me wondering what side of the bed I woke up on this morning.

Or is this one of those things where its (or we are failing) not because we are bad and made mistakes but because the world is moving on?

I would really like to know what kind of analysis these people do, and what metric they use to arrive at their conclusions. There have been numerous cloud/streaming-based platforms. None of them has succeeded. The PS5, is selling better than the PS4 which sold better than the PS3/360 (you know, when they thought consoles were a great idea), and yet this could be the last console gen? And let's just pretend that Nintendo doesn't exist. Or is it lost tp these fine folks that we went from having hundreds of million-dollar IPs/releases in the PS360 gen to now having billion-dollar releases or IPs as the norm? I mean, in just 4 months spiderman 2 went on to do 10M sales, that's like $700M in revenue. This is what I mean by billion-dollar IPs. And yet consoles are dying?

I don't get it, what am I missing here?
 

jroc74

Phone reception is more important to me than human rights
Well....this is confirmation that MS were thinking about Halo coming to PlayStation years ago.

HeisenbergFX4 HeisenbergFX4 just doesnt miss.

My question now is....were they discussing this during the 360 days, because if so cot dayum....multi platform has been a part of internal discussions for a looong ass time.
 
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HeisenbergFX4

Gold Member
Well....this is confirmation that MS were thinking about Halo coming to PlayStation years ago.

HeisenbergFX4 HeisenbergFX4 just doesnt miss.

My question now is....were they discussing this during the 360 days, because if so cot dayum....multi platform has been a part of internal discussions for a looong ass time.
Canadian Thank You GIF by NETFLIX
 

Elysium44

Banned
Is it me or does this guy sound stupid? He's said some things and has some takes that's got me wondering what side of the bed I woke up on this morning.

Or is this one of those things where its (or we are failing) not because we are bad and made mistakes but because the world is moving on?

I would really like to know what kind of analysis these people do, and what metric they use to arrive at their conclusions. There have been numerous cloud/streaming-based platforms. None of them has succeeded. The PS5, is selling better than the PS4 which sold better than the PS3/360 (you know, when they thought consoles were a great idea), and yet this could be the last console gen? And let's just pretend that Nintendo doesn't exist. Or is it lost tp these fine folks that we went from having hundreds of million-dollar IPs/releases in the PS360 gen to now having billion-dollar releases or IPs as the norm? I mean, in just 4 months spiderman 2 went on to do 10M sales, that's like $700M in revenue. This is what I mean by billion-dollar IPs. And yet consoles are dying?

I don't get it, what am I missing here?

I don't think he sounds stupid at all, he's asking the right questions and reaching logical conclusions.

$700m in revenue sounds fine until you remember the game cost $300m to make. And for every game which provides a relatively big return, many others don't. The cost of designing and producing consoles is gigantic and all has to be recouped before you can think about making a cent of profit. It isn't a safe bet for investors to make money, video games are an art, not a science. No more than you can pay an author or singer a fortune and guarantee a bestseller or a top ten single.
 
Have always respected Peter Moore and love the effort he put in for the Dreamcast and early 360. That said, the FUD around Dreamcast during the PS2 hype was mainly coming from Western publications. That Toy Story graphics quote for example? It was from a magazine and I think that magazine mistranslated something from a Nikkei newspaper where the editor used a similar quote. Now yeah you wouldn't expect Sony to come out and correct them; at the end of the day that's good publicity for them, bad publicity for SEGA. But it should show that those weren't necessarily talking points from Sony (though I won't deny Sony probably did some boisterous bragging about PS2 leading up to its launch, I just don't remember much of it specifically naming or referring to the Dreamcast).

Anyway, it's interesting to get his opinions on the developments surrounding Microsoft's gaming initiative these days. IMO I still think there are people at the division (probably definitely Phil) taking the measured approach with smaller/older game ports to see if growth momentum for Xbox consoles and/or Game Pass sub growth actually happens this year, without having to bleed billions more in costs to do so. They probably have work on "bigger" ports ongoing in the background just in case there's no significant reversal of fortune this year (because I do think this is the last year they're going to give to see if Xbox continues with the traditional business model, or just shifts to going fully third-party), but won't commit to bringing them over until the answer for the consoles and Game Pass is absolutely clear.

Or, they could have decided the gaming division's fate a long while ago and will gradually shift to being a fully third-party multiplatform publisher no matter what, because they already know whatever momentum Xbox consoles and/or Game Pass (without any presence on Sony & Nintendo platforms, which won't happen as long as Microsoft is still making consoles (DOES NOT mean gaming hardware devices; these can be two different things and you know what that would mean)) will be minuscule and not the growth they need to hit.

The next round of ports announced for PS4/5 and Switch 2 will indicate which of those two paths they're actually operating on, IMO.
 

splattered

Member
As much as some of you may want to laugh at what was said he probably isn't wrong across the board. I'm getting older myself but I'm sure before I get too old and stop playing we will see a much more if not totally platform agnostic gaming landscape.
 

JohnnyFootball

GerAlt-Right. Ciriously.
For most companies. For them? It was fuck you money and couch cushion money. That's why the one xbox guy put crash bandicoot up on Twitter
Wrong. Phil and the Xbox team thought it was FU money. The higher ups said nope: This is an investment.
 

XXL

Member
This doom and gloom cycle when it comes to the future of the console industry in general, is honestly getting pathetic.

Xbox is failing as a hardware manufacturer, not anyone else, everyone one else is just dealing with the realities of the current economy.
 

Clear

CliffyB's Cock Holster
Plain truth is that the failure rate of the 360 would've bankrupted most other companies, only MS deep pockets allowed them to get away with it.
 

mckmas8808

Mckmaster uses MasterCard to buy Slave drives
The death of the console as we know it will happen in around 2 decades, what does Sony already claim 80% or some shit of its sales are digital? You already don't own anything. Graphics will plateau to near realism and streaming will catch up to be non noticeable in ping time as compression and speed grow.

Sony would much prefer to have 100 million paying subscribers for $25 a month then to be shipping hardware. The profit margin on the consoles would be largely small to who cares when you factor in development and engineering, their main gross profit comes from micro transactions and their own store fees.

We'll have three apps eventually across any platform that has a screen and can sync a controller, Microsoft Nintendo Sony. Even if this doesn't happen in the next two decades it's inevitable.

bb86d736b77d79437fb1d1e91e4ae92b406a4f9a.gif

The problem with this is the logistics of it all.

1. Will people want their "consoles" built into their TVs? Because now I'll need to buy a new TV just to have a new console.
2. How will developers make games for hardware that's different in each TV?
3. Why would Nintendo just give up being who they are just to appease companies like MS that can't figure how to survive?
4. Getting to 100 million subscribers, paying $25 a month is harder than making good hardware. Sony has been making good console hardware for 30 years.
5. A subscriber will always be a soft customer, compared to someone being your hardware. Apple knows this full well too. If MS, Sony, and Nintendo all leave the hardware space, Apple will step in and dominate.
 

Mr.Phoenix

Member
I don't think he sounds stupid at all, he's asking the right questions and reaching logical conclusions.

$700m in revenue sounds fine until you remember the game cost $300m to make. And for every game which provides a relatively big return, many others don't. The cost of designing and producing consoles is gigantic and all has to be recouped before you can think about making a cent of profit. It isn't a safe bet for investors to make money, video games are an art, not a science. No more than you can pay an author or singer a fortune and guarantee a bestseller or a top ten single.
I dont get it at all. So what if the game cost $300M to make if they are raking in double that. How is that any different from movies that cost upwards of $200M to make and are considered a success when it brings in $500M?

And not every game has to or costs $300M to make. A lot of them come in at around or under $100M Which means they only need to sell 3M copies to make a healthy profit. And of course, there will be those that doesn't perform well, as is the case with every single part of the entertainment industry.

I simply do not see the sense in asking if this is the last console gen, or suggesting that there is no reason to have a PS6 because "what does it do that the PS5 does not"... that has to be the dumbest shit I have heard.
 

Puscifer

Member
If they were able to make CoD exclusive, they'd be talking out of the other side of their mouth.
Reality is if they did it wouldn't have the effect they think it would, I could see a couple million MAYBE, but just like Phil said no one abandoning their entire library for a couple games here and there.
 
Hypothetically speaking, I would wonder what would be the client/application that would house all the games if they were to be on a TV via a chip that Moore suggested.

Would I know need to buy a Sony TV to play Playstation related content? Doubtful, but I'm curious to see how PS/Xbox/Nintendo would be on a natural app to house all of that. Would certainly be a weird thing to experience. But I could see something like that start to happen after the next-gen ends.

Forget all you know about dedicated hardware, this seems to lead to digital game platforms as a service
 
As much as some of you may want to laugh at what was said he probably isn't wrong across the board. I'm getting older myself but I'm sure before I get too old and stop playing we will see a much more if not totally platform agnostic gaming landscape.

I agree to an extent except for games going to Xbox. I just think there's no point in it for either Nintendo or Sony. They don't have many consoles out there and on top of that the software sales aren't great. Sony at this point can still release their games on Switch 2 if they need to and get even more sales that way. Nintendo still has PC and Sony they can release on. So I do agree to an extent and if MS does exit the hardware market then yea I think we could see that future you talk about.
 

FrankWza

Member
Reality is if they did it wouldn't have the effect they think it would, I could see a couple million MAYBE, but just like Phil said no one abandoning their entire library for a couple games here and there.
But it would have made them keep buying publishers and IPs. At a certain point it would have swaying power. They were just going for it at that point and it was their only shot. They kept getting out maneuvered by 2 smaller companies over many console gens
 

MacReady13

Member
Christ almighty gaming as a whole is in a real shitty place at the moment. Losing billions on a console launch- why the need to spend so much money on consoles? Why do they need to have so much power? I can guarantee you that if the Series X was twice as powerful as the PS5 people would STILL buy PS5 over Series X (look at Switch sales ffs). This industry seems to like to blow money away for no reason in particular and they still can't get every game running as they'd like (Dragon's Dogma 30 fps in this day and age with these consoles is pathetic).

Just go the conservative route with consoles- Nintendo has had the right idea for a while now and they are reaping the benefits. These companies need to stop thinking that spending more means you'll get more! SNES is one of my fav consoles of all time! PC gaming could've blown it out of the park but who cares? If you only want to play games on consoles then that's what you'll do, regardless of the power difference between PC and consoles.
 

MacReady13

Member
Games Streaming and Subscriptions games has been a thing for years now and it has not caught on in a meaningful way.

Microsoft is trying hard to convince people that they are 5D geniuses when the reality is they keep trying to play into a future that might never happen instead of trying to play in the present.

The mass market audience that those initiatives appeal to have all moved to F2P mobile trash. they've been conditioned to not pay for games. Let alone a paid games subscription services.
Glad that after saying it for so long I have moved into the PC gaming space. I still own (and love) my consoles, but the day gaming goes streaming only is the day I'm out. I'm sick and tired of these companies trying to dictate where THEY want the industry to go instead of listening to the consumer.

Peter Moore said it in that interview- movies/TV and music all went streaming but gaming is different! You don't control music with a control, as it just plays in the backround. Same with film/tv. Gaming is different. Sooner these higher ups consider the fact that WE, as gamers, will dictate what is popular and where the industry heads, the better they will be.
 

splattered

Member
I agree to an extent except for games going to Xbox. I just think there's no point in it for either Nintendo or Sony. They don't have many consoles out there and on top of that the software sales aren't great. Sony at this point can still release their games on Switch 2 if they need to and get even more sales that way. Nintendo still has PC and Sony they can release on. So I do agree to an extent and if MS does exit the hardware market then yea I think we could see that future you talk about.
As expensive as everything has gotten, I really think that Sony will eventually bow out to. I can see Nintendo staying course with cheap Hardware and all their exclusive IP that sell little kids but that's about it
 

DaGwaphics

Member
No, you're missing the point that these products needed more Q&A. That's on the company who sold them.

Agreed. The ruling that caused that change just came really late for the 360, after the final design had already cleared its testing. Certainly they should have looked at everything again after they made that change.

That extra year put PS3 in a much better spot, but the early units still had issues with longevity, though they made it out of the warranty period and were old enough that it didn't get talked abut that much.
 

DaGwaphics

Member
Christ almighty gaming as a whole is in a real shitty place at the moment. Losing billions on a console launch- why the need to spend so much money on consoles?

The chiplet future AMD is working towards might help things quite a bit. If you didn't want to get crazy custom, it might be possible to cobble together something workable for a lot less. We might not even be looking at APUs at that point, but just multiple chiplets that share a package. Maybe the console makers buy some of the chiplets that weren't perfect or don't use the latest and greatest, etc. Intel is moving this way as well making them another source potentially.

It shouldn't cost billions of dollars to design a PC, and that's basically all these consoles are now.
 

bitbydeath

Member
As expensive as everything has gotten, I really think that Sony will eventually bow out to. I can see Nintendo staying course with cheap Hardware and all their exclusive IP that sell little kids but that's about it
I think PC as we know it today will go before Sony does. Large desktops won’t be needed in future as technology improves, and of course Sony is going to thrive for many years, gaining further sales left behind from Xbox.
 

IAmRei

Member
If the console dies, or if its the time to game as subscribe only or stresming only, i will only play old game until the machine broke and i cant find any replacement. Or emulate it if there is any working emu on the future. We have lot of libraries in these decades, and occassionally i found old translated game is worthy to play. There still option for someone like me.
 

RaySoft

Member
The idea of consoles delivering media locally won't be out of a market before the cloud delivers an even better performance. Simple as that. But that's with consumer shades on. I'm afraid the market will cave before that and deem the creation of a new console too expensive for the risk.
 

drganon

Member
This doom and gloom cycle when it comes to the future of the console industry in general, is honestly getting pathetic.

Xbox is failing as a hardware manufacturer, not anyone else, everyone one else is just dealing with the realities of the current economy.
Ever since Xbox waved the white flag and alot of posters suddenly decided they were PC gamers, we've been overrun with these threads.
 

DaGwaphics

Member
Is it me or does this guy sound stupid? He's said some things and has some takes that's got me wondering what side of the bed I woke up on this morning.

Or is this one of those things where its (or we are failing) not because we are bad and made mistakes but because the world is moving on?

I would really like to know what kind of analysis these people do, and what metric they use to arrive at their conclusions. There have been numerous cloud/streaming-based platforms. None of them has succeeded. The PS5, is selling better than the PS4 which sold better than the PS3/360 (you know, when they thought consoles were a great idea), and yet this could be the last console gen? And let's just pretend that Nintendo doesn't exist. Or is it lost tp these fine folks that we went from having hundreds of million-dollar IPs/releases in the PS360 gen to now having billion-dollar releases or IPs as the norm? I mean, in just 4 months spiderman 2 went on to do 10M sales, that's like $700M in revenue. This is what I mean by billion-dollar IPs. And yet consoles are dying?

I don't get it, what am I missing here?

I think what he says is reasonable. I think he is still clued into the industry and is looking beyond the sales numbers to the general consumer sentiment. Which is largely that 4yrs in this console generation has been less impressive/noteworthy than the last one, which oddly enough mirrors what people thought about last-gen in comparison to PS360. Assuming this trend continues and the next iteration brings with it an even less notable difference in visuals and a development price increase along with that, you can see an issue where buyers might be less eager to jump in. The long cross-gen phase won't be a new thing next time and a lot of users might choose to wait. I think a lot hinges on the pricing these systems can get down to as well, the PS5 likely won't keep pace with PS4 much longer if they can't get a significant price reduction on it (they will run the table on $500 buyers). Finding a good gimmick to act as a hook will probably be important as well.
 
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What I think Phil is doing is setting up some smoke signals that we're thinking very differently. And then the idea of, well, we bought Activision Blizzard King, but we may not make those games ultimately exclusive on our platform. There may not be a platform, and we turn into what we really had at our roots, which is a software and services company.

But the challenge will undoubtedly be coming from Nadella: what does it look like without hardware? And so that's going on right now, and, what do we look like if we're more like EA than we are Sony? So that's what I'm sure is going on.

This is Microsoft's DNA - you can tell they absolutely loathe every single hardware initiative they have tried. Zune, Xbox, Surface, you name it. You can tell there is no passion in these. I'm not saying the individuals working on it don't have passion, I'm saying Microsoft as a company refuse to go all in on hardware. They only support hardware enough to get consumers into their software ecosystem, that's all. Xbox is no exception and you can tell they despise it. Nadella must be going out of his mind with frustration about ANOTHER console generation. You can tell he just doesn't understand it, because the man probably has never played a video game in his life. And he is the one calling the shots at Microsoft.
 
Lets not forget that the initial cost of building servers in every region is going to be in the tens of billions too. With consoles, you can offset that cost by having consumers foot $500 of the cost. That goes away with subscriptions.

which means they will have to produce 30-40 million consoles for the first year alone in their datacenters and eat the cost. No one is doing that.

I think their hope is not that they will need to build consoles for their xCloud platform. It's that they will abstract the hardware to the point where they are running VMs in a data center. Scale up and scale out when they need to, and Microsoft is excellent at this because enterprise software is their bread and butter. Get everyone onto your platform, lock them in, and then start cranking up the price of a subscription - that's their endgame.
 
Here my problem tho, if they go 3rd party and stop making system. What’s gonna happen to the digital library I own? Can they transfer that least to the Microsoft Store pc for the games that are there and maybe see if they can make a deal with Sony for the other games? Or something. I have both systems. But shit. There some games I bought on Xbox.
 

HeisenbergFX4

Gold Member
Well....this is confirmation that MS were thinking about Halo coming to PlayStation years ago.

HeisenbergFX4 HeisenbergFX4 just doesnt miss.

My question now is....were they discussing this during the 360 days, because if so cot dayum....multi platform has been a part of internal discussions for a looong ass time.
Btw to answer your question as far as I remember it wasn’t during the 360 days because their ecosystem was fairly healthy
 

Mattyp

Gold Member
That's not how it works, ping is induced by the distance your data has to travel from and to your device. Except if we begin to build data centers next to every town, you won't have this low ping for everyone. Well except maybe if we manage to make data travel faster than the speed of light someday.
I know exactly how it works, but improvments
as a whole will happen where it becomes negliable to unnoticeable.

To put this into context I have a holiday house 4 hours away from the nearest data centre, this is tank water, and a micro grid community.

I run starlink at this address, I can already stream the vast majority of games near good enough on xcloud.

Two decades ago just 2 hours out of Sydney I was on 28.8K dialup that was as good as it gets, I now carry a phone that does 1.2Gbps regularly just off cellular. People just need to remind themselves how far humanity has come as a whole in two decades and how much further we'll go now even with memes like AI being able to do heavy lifting in spaces.
 
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damidu

Member
Ever since Xbox waved the white flag and alot of posters suddenly decided they were PC gamers, we've been overrun with these threads.
its hard copium to mentally prepeare themselves for the inevitable xbox-less future.
rats are adaptable animals lol
 
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ShaiKhulud1989

Gold Member
Moore is GOAT just because X360 software under his rule was so good that it literally overshadowed the RROD issue. Gee, I've bought like 2 consoles in a row for myself after my respected Falcons died despite my best soldering efforts.

That beind said, I'm still grateful for RROD cuz my main income during my student years was Xbox 360 RROD repairs. That actually helped me a lot with funding the dates with my then-gf-now-wife. 11 years of marriage later, I'm not upset about the red ring. And let's not forget that brilliant X360 controller was developed under Moore's tenure too.

Staying on topic tho I would add that Moore was a rare corporate guy with true love for the medium. He understood the internal dynamics in MS bureaucracy just enough to push the platform-defining decisions. That's why his words about what's going on inside MS are very interesting.
 

Gamezone

Gold Member
What's the alternative to no consoles? PC only? Because we all know that game streaming sucks, and that we are nowhere ready for it.
 
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