In a recent interview with COO of Electronic Arts (EA), Peter Moore, we learned that the gaming company is excited to see the fight between Sony’s PlayStation 4 (PS4) and Microsoft’s Xbox One as the holidays approach. In fact, EA sits smack dab in the sweet spot and expects a “great fight” during the holidays.
“I think it’s going to be a great fight in the holiday. And as a third-party publisher, we sit right in the sweet spot,” Moore said. “Consumers love it as well, and it’s good for the industry. You need powerful companies like Sony and Microsoft to be battling out with each other because it drives investment in their platforms. It drives competition. You want to see Nintendo come back with the Wii U. All in all, it becomes healthy for gamers, for the environment. When you have a runaway winner, that actually has a reverse effect.”
Moore also stated that EA plans to support the previous generation of consoles, such as the PS3 and Xbox 360. “The hope is we get a decent tail of two or three years, and we’ll continue to make games for those platforms as long as fans buy them,” he explained.
“What PlayStation did with the PS2 was a wonderful tail. I was at Microsoft and we kind of buried the Xbox quickly because to be blunt, it was just losing money. We stopped making games for it ourselves and stopped manufacturing it because the view was, ‘Let’s move to Xbox 360. Let’s get there quickly, establish a beachhead before the PlayStation 3 came out,’ and that certainly worked well in that generation. You could argue maybe the tables have been somewhat turned in this generation,” he adds further.
As the holiday season approaches, both the Kinect-less Xbox One and PS4 are available for $399. Unlike last holiday season, where the Xbox One with Kinect was $100 above the PS4. As Moore states, competition is not only fantastic for gaming companies like EA, but for consumers too.
