Despite Sarah Bond's reassurances on Xbox Next as a 'monster of power' and Phil Spencer on the future of Xbox consoles, Peter Moore doesn't seem to be of the same opinion. The former Microsoft executive believes that the Redmond house, and Sony, are considering the possibility of saying goodbye to consoles.
In the same interview with IGN.com that saw Moore discuss the future of Halo on PlayStation, the former head of the videogame division of the US technological giant believes that this could be the last generation of consoles, at least in the 'classic' definition of the platforms home hardware: “Sony has not yet revealed PS6 but it is a company oriented towards hardware development, while for Microsoft the question is different. I am sure that Microsoft would welcome a totally cloud future for video games. But the fact is that both Sony and Microsoft know that, if they want to develop a new generation of consoles, they will have to take on billions of dollars in losses because the gaming industry is looking elsewhere, the real business is in the mobile sector, that's where companies how Apple and Google earn tens of billions of dollars.”
The former Xbox boss also wonders if “Microsoft and Sony are not asking themselves questions about the future, for example on the role of AI, on the multi-billion investments to be made in a market that is now mature and with little margin for real growth like that of consoles, on the costs of software development and hardware design that are growing exponentially. Microsoft is certainly asking itself these questions, just look at their broad-based, multi-year strategy based on Azure cloud gaming and investments in artificial intelligence. We already know that Nintendo is creating a next gen console and most people believe that Sony is doing the same, but There are question marks over whether Microsoft is thinking about a 'significant' new generation for Xbox“.
In his analysis, Peter Moore also underlines how “in the console sector, and more generally in the entire videogame industry, many things have changed in the last 20 years. I look at these changes from the point of view of the large companies that produce consoles and I ask myself : Are they ready and financially prepared for the multi-billion dollar battle they will have to fight with rising development and production costs? What is it that a hypothetical PS6 could do more than a PS5 to the point of pushing people to buy it en masse? And Xbox Next, or Switch 2? God forbid they are just incremental evolutions (as in graphics or resolution, ed.). Well, I think companies in the sector are asking themselves these same questions.”