Xbox Once Considered Bringing Halo to PlayStation, Says Former Boss

Halo Infinite Multiplayer

We are now entering a new era of multiplatform video games, where first-party hardware manufacturers like Sony and Microsoft are starting to consider breaking down the fences of their walled gardens. Microsoft has embraced PC for a long time now, and Sony is also bringing its PlayStation exclusives to the platform. Recently, Microsoft started debates across the games industry by announcing that it would bring some of its Xbox exclusives to PlayStation, but that idea was thrown around a decade ago according to Peter Moore.

In an interview with IGN, Moore, who oversaw Xbox during the original console and the Xbox 360’s run. Moore revealed that at one point, the company was considering porting its signature franchises like Halo to PlayStation.

“I do remember conversations about Halo on PlayStation,” said Moore. “You're constantly looking. You get into wargaming, which we did prior to the launch of Xbox 360 as a team. We went away for a couple of days and I played the role of Ken Kutaragi, and this was fascinating to me. McKinsey, the consultancy group, set this up and the idea is you understand your competition a little better when you do some wargames.”

Moore went on to talk about the ballooning budgets of video games, making the prospect of doing more multiplatform releases more enticing. “Look, if Microsoft says, wait, we're doing $250 million on our own platforms, but if we then took Halo as, let's call it a third-party, we could do a billion,” he said.

“You got to think long and hard about that, right? I mean, you just got to go, yeah, should it be kept? It's a piece of intellectual property. It's bigger than just a game. And how do you leverage that? Those are the conversations that always happen with, how do you leverage it in everything that we would do?”

Moore admitted that Xbox wouldn’t be where it is without Halo, a game that single-handedly catapulted the original Xbox to success. He also talked about how discussions about the current console generation being the last aren’t a new thing, with Microsoft debating the same more than a decade ago. The company has a major advantage when it comes to cloud streaming with its Azure architecture.

"What you're now seeing and certainly hearing from a company like Microsoft is, does the cloud replace the need for bespoke hardware?" he said.

"Does streaming change the way we game to the devices that we're now used to, in particular smartphones? I don't think people are gaming less, they're just gaming differently. And more and more you're seeing a generation coming through that is not about to sit down for an evening in front of the television with whatever the game du jour is this week."

Moore talked about the console gaming industry looking at the music industry and learning lessons from the boom of streaming services in the sector.

"The broader picture — and we certainly feared during my time even at Microsoft — we were saying then, in 2007, is this the last console generation? Do televisions start to come with chips that can play games and you just need a controller? Is the PC, as it was then, a renaissance? And why do you need a bespoke piece of hardware that costs us, Microsoft, billions upon billions of dollars to install, and you hope to hell you get an attach rate of software and something out of your Xbox Live, your connected service, that would justify the losses, the hemorrhaging of cash that hardware costs you?"

Talking about the final stretch of the Xbox 360 generation, he talked about how Microsoft was debating the need for home consoles. Moore said one of the key factors that prompted the company to debate the production of a new console was the propagation of cheaper broadband. One of the factors differentiating cloud streaming prospects of games vs. movies was the increased storage space that the former requires. "The thing that kept us going was, games were 30 gigabytes then or 40 gigabytes and music was four megabytes, and a movie you could stream, but it was linear and passive," he said.

Considering that Microsoft is a software and services company first and foremost, Moore thinks that the company would "love it" if the industry accepted cloud gaming with open arms.

"The only thing that Microsoft doesn't get to play in as well as anybody else is the smartphone business, right? Because that's where Apple, Google, the handset manufacturers will benefit from enormously and they already are. They're making tens of billions of dollars without really trying in gaming with the 30% royalties."

Moore makes some excellent points, pointing to a future where home consoles may not exist. While that future will still take some time to arrive, it's almost inevitable. As far as Microsoft is concerned, Xbox will still exist in people's living rooms as a console, as the company recently confirmed that its next-generation console is in development. At the very least, we still have PlayStation and Nintendo actively working on new hardware.

Related: Every Xbox Game Coming To PS5 And Nintendo Switch

The Halo series is available on Xbox consoles and PlayStation.