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Xbox Exec Peter Moore Leaving Microsoft for EA
Citing 'personal reasons' the face of Microsoft's Xbox system, Peter Moore, will be leaving the company as of the end of the month. The official press release just states that Moore is moving back to Northern California. Kotaku actually brought up the story as a rumour a few hours ago; their source pointed to EA's sports division as Moore's new home. Moore's replacement as head of the Interactive Entertainment Business in Redmond is Don Mattrick, himself a former EA president. "Mattrick was the founder of Distinctive Software Inc., which operated as a private company from 1982 until its merger with EA in 1991. Mattrick held various senior positions within EA, most recently as president of Worldwide Studios, until his resignation in February 2006. In February 2007, Mattrick began working with the Entertainment and Devices Division at Microsoft as an external advisor. 'Peter has contributed enormously to the games business since joining Microsoft in 2003 and we are sad to see him go,' said Robbie Bach, president of Entertainment and Devices Division at Microsoft ... While Peter will certainly be missed, we are delighted to have one of the industry's most talented and passionate veterans on board to lead the business.'"
Microsofts business practice usually is, if they cannot make a significant inroad with the third iteration of something then they slowly pull out. Axing something usually does not happen overnight.
Most of MS's problems have stemmed from Moore sticking his foot in his mouth. He has been easily one of the most arrogant "leaders" in the gaming business rivaled only by Kutaragi. Most of MS's pr problems can be directly related to some boneheaded comment by Moore from "3% failure rate" and "Y'know, things break" to this weeks remarks about wanting Final Fantasy as a 360 exclusive. I am guessing the "personal reasons" are more in line with Kutaragi's dismissal from Sony. I certainly dont see this as the "put a fork in it" end of the 360 that the Sony fanboys are wishing for, if anything it will give MS an opportunity to right the ship and perhaps get someone in that position that can be a little more in touch and sympathetic to their audience. I nominate Hironobu Sakaguchi he is already in house and could be the "face" that would give MS an inroad to the Japanese market that has been impossible to attain.
If you only look at money through console sales that might be true, but what about money from GAMES and assessories,merchandise also online sales, they have movies and all sorts of online content to download for money.
Yeah, and it all gets reported on the same quarterly balance sheets.
Sheesh, some of you guys act like MS is hiding a bunch of profits under their mattress or something. They have to report all their profit and loss; it's all public. Go read it yourself; Yahoo finance has it all for free if you don't have a brokerage account anywhere.
The fact is MS was $5.5 billion in the hole by last quarter, is losing around $220 million every single quarter on its entertainment division, and has now taken a $1.1 billion charge on top of that. These are facts that have been publicly reported by MS in their SEC filings. There's no hidden profit there. There's no "well yeah, if you only count this or that". That's counting everything.