Moore Says MS Can't Touch PS3 Launch

In a surprising bout of sincerity, Peter Moore admits that there's nothing Microsoft can do to touch the PlayStation 3 at launch.

Bill Gates caused a stir last year when he said that Microsoft was prepping Halo 3 to launch alongside the PlayStation 3, to give gamers pause before siding with Sony. But in a recent interview, Microsoft's Peter Moore admitted to tech site Engadget that whatever his company tries to do, Sony is going to have a sell-out on its hands:

"They'll launch and it'll be very successful. There's no doubt, regardless of whether I throw a title in there or an update of Live or whatever, that it's not going to affect their launch."

"You don't think they're not going to sell out of PlayStation 3s, do you? You think that if I could create a piece of IP so that PlayStation 3s would arrive at Best Buy and they'd sit on the shelves? Come on, it's not going to happen."

Moore said that instead of taking the "stupid, ridiculous" step of forcing programmers to rush a game out when it was needed, Microsoft would prefer to have it come out when it's ready.

"...I'd rather focus on the fact that whatever we do, whether it's what Rare's doing or what Bungie's doing, that we make the best games possible and that we release it when it's ready and that it moves our platform."

Many people believed Bill Gates when he said Halo 3 was coming in to block, simply because it's the biggest franchise Microsoft has, and what better way to try to disturb your biggest rival.

For Moore, it's exactly this importance that requires that Bungie gets all the time it needs:

"The Halo Nation would string me out from some flagpole if I used Halo to be a competitive counter balance to something else, for it to be anything other than for it to be the greatest game ever on an Xbox console - or on any console."

"There's too much invested in this franchise and the Halo Nation is too dear to us to use them as pawns in some bigger game. It doesn't work that way."

Alex Wollenschlaeger
Editor, Kikizo Games