Take one look at the gaming sections of any social media platform and odds are you probably won’t have to scroll too far to find people arguing about which platform is the best to play games on.
While the person in question may consider themselves to be a member of the infamous ‘PC master race’, the chances are just as good that they’ll be an Xbox or Playstation fan taking potshots at the other expensive box.
However, as reported by IGN, according to former Xbox executive Peter Moore, the divides that form the basis of these intense verbal battles pitting those in green against those in blue weren’t an intended consequence of the sales war between Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo.
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The comments from Moore, who headed up Xbox’s efforts to compete with Sony and Nintendo from 2003 to 2007, at which point he left to join EA, were made during an appearance on the Front Office Sports podcast My Other Passion.
“We encouraged the console wars, not to create division, but to challenge each other,” Moore claims, adding: “And when I say each other, I mean Microsoft and Sony.”
Moore went on to suggest that this competition played a positive role in getting the games industry to where it is today, singling out the ‘Red Ring Of Death’ controversy, which involved a litany of serious hardware failures for the Xbox 360 that forced a mass recall of the console, as the kind of speed bump that the competition helped the company foster the attitude to overcome.
“If Microsoft hadn’t have stuck the course after the Xbox, after the Red Rings of Death,” says Moore, continuing: “gaming would be a poorer place for it, you wouldn’t have the competition you have today.”
In this statement, Moore suggests today’s gaming landscape to be a lot less fraught with wars between fanbases than it was during the 360 era, a sentiment which certainly rings true in the minds of many veteran gamers.
However, the old hostilities haven’t completely disappeared, with Microsoft’s deal to acquire Activision Blizzard and Sony’s purchase of former Halo developer Bungie earlier this year having seen fans from both sides fire a decent amount of flak at each other.
So, remember your hazmat suit next time you search with Xbox or Playstation on Twitter and make sure to follow us for more coverage of both platforms.