Update: Here’s part four.
Peter Moore is quite the storied individual. He was the head of Sega of America and responsible for the Dreamcast’s launch. He was head of Microsoft’s Xbox division and now he’s the head of EA Sports division.
Well he had quite an interview with the Guardian’s Games Blog. The interview was so grand, it was split into three parts, here, here and here. However, let’s just grab the quotesthat made headlines (again):
Dreamcast was a phenomenal 18 months of pain, heartache, euphoria… We thought we had it, but then Playstation came out, that infamous issue of Newsweek with the Emotion Engine on the cover… and of course, EA didn’t publish which left a big hole, not only in sports but in other genres. We ended up that Christmas period not being able to get to where we needed to be – we weren’t far short, we just couldn’t get that critical mass…
Bless the Dreamcast and its short, but awesome life.
He wanted my attitude, he didn’t care what I’d achieved at Sega, he wanted to know how I was going to win for Microsoft, how we were going to take on Sony, how would we compete with – or acquire – Nintendo. Those were the conversations in those days. It was a classic build or buy conversation.
I’m sure everyone wanted to buy Nintendo if they could.
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.
This is old news. Dean Takahashi’s Xbox 360 Uncloaked already dealt with this. Plus, this is only part of the story. Another contributing factor was Microsoft’s inability to shrink the CPU and GPU and eventually get them into the same chip — like what Sony was doing with the PS2. They had no control over the chip designs and NVIDIA and Intel sure weren’t going to allow people tinkering with their chips without proper payments.
Their hard drive situation only got worse as time passed since Microsoft wasn’t budging from the 10 GB hard drive. Imagine how much it would cost to request a 10 GB hard drive being made when it’s actually cheaper to develop a 120 GB hard drive. If you wanted an uncommon size, you’re going to have to pay for it.
P.S – Thanks to Forge for getting the ball rolling
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