14 DAY TRIAL // Peter Moore, who is currently occupying the position of chief operations officer at Electronic Arts, expects the competition between the Xbox One and the PlayStation 4 to head up in time for the crucial Christmas shopping period and believes that the entire industry will get a boost because of it.
The executive tells GamesIndustry.biz that a third-party publisher is very well placed to deliver game experiences on both platforms and make sure that fans always have a new title to try out regardless of their preferences.
He explains that, "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."
The big launches for Electronic Arts before Christmas include sports titles, like Madden NFL 15 and FIFA 15, a huge role-playing game in Dragon Age: Inquisition and the Visceral Games created shooter Battlefield Hardline.
Despite the focus on the Xbox One and the PlayStation 4, Moore says that the older platforms from Sony and Microsoft will continue to get support for at least two or three years.
The COO adds, "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."
Electronic Arts has long said that it wants to be platform agnostic in order to make sure that its titles attract as wide an audience as possible.
At the moment, the PlayStation 4 leads the Xbox One in terms of sales and the gap is probably somewhere between 2 and 3 million units, when all the countries in which the platforms are launched are taken into account.
To shrink this already considerable difference, Microsoft has eliminated the Kinect motion tracking system from the core retail package of its device and has reduced its official price to 399 dollars or Euro.
Both companies are probably also preparing bundles that will be launched in time for Christmas in order to make their next-gen consoles more attractive and temporary price drops are also a possibility.