A few weeks ago, Microsoft announced it would release a few of its first-party Xbox and PC games for Sony's PlayStation 5 and Nintendo's Switch consoles. At the same time, Microsoft Xbox President Sarah Bond confirmed the company was working on the next Xbox console, adding it would offer "the largest technical leap you will have ever seen in a hardware generation."
However, the former head of Microsoft's Xbox division, Peter Moore, believes the company is having some discussions and debates right now on the future of releasing hardware consoles. In a new interview with IGN, Moore stated his belief that those discussions are also happening at Sony and Nintendo.
But I think it's a real serious question that's being asked I'm sure in Tokyo, in Redmond, Washington, in Kyoto. That's what everybody's working on right now, because when you start off that next generation, you've got to be ready to absorb billions of dollars in losses. And is the industry, given all the layoffs and everything we're going through right now, is the industry ready for that?
Moore believes that gamers could decide in the future that buying a separate piece of hardware to play games on their TV is not worth it and play their future games on a PC or their smartphone. The future of AI in developing games could also be a factor. Moore added:
And then if you're Microsoft and you're Phil Spencer, you've got Satya Nadella coming in and saying, alright, what is the future here and how does this play into the biggest strategy of cloud with Azure, with AI? What are we doing with AI game development? How do you make your games faster, cheaper, with less people? These are all the questions I think are being asked.
Moore also said that while he was at Microsoft running the Xbox division, there were questions about the future of console hardware, and there were discussions of whether television makers could just put in a chip inside a big screen PC to play games with a controller.
Moore certainly has some interesting opinions on the future of the game console business. While Microsoft has announced it is working on its next-gen Xbox hardware, its launch of Xbox Cloud Gaming could be a forerunner of a console-less game industry that could happen sooner rather than later.
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