Peter Moore: Hard drive killed first Xbox

In the

third part

of The Guardian’s recent interview with current EA Sports boss and former Sega and Microsoft gaming head Peter Moore, the charismatic figure has admitted that the price of the hard drive in the original Xbox was the main factor that forced the company to make an early move to Xbox 360.

Moore stated: Not having a hard drive in every Xbox 360 was a hard decision, but we wanted to get price under control. The hard drive in every Xbox killed us; we we’re still selling it at $199 and the hard drive was like $70. That’s why we prematurely left the original Xbox, because the more we were selling – there was still great demand – it was killing us, and there was no way to bring the price down.

So in the end we determined at around the 25 million unit mark that we just needed to slow this thing down and just not sell any more, and move to the 360 as quickly as we possibly could. And to this day people still believe we left the Xbox too early but it was purely for financial purposes.”

Elsewhere in the interview, in which Moore has previously admitted to being the individual responsible for finally dropped the axe on Sega’s struggling Dreamcast, he explains the mixed feelings at Microsoft concerning the firm’s entry into the console market:

There were two very distinct camps. I’d say the great majority of people loved it. It was a great rallying cry, they were proud of the fact we were doing consoles – it was the first physical thing you could really get behind at Microsoft other than a mouse or a keyboard, and it was entertainment.

There was a vocal minority that disagreed with video games as a cultural phenomenon – the content we were doing. We did M rated, we did allow GTA to be published on the platform and I had no issues with that… and then the drain on the company’s stock price, because we were a multi-billion dollar investment group and it had an impact on the stock price.”