Xbox Loses its Head, EA Replaces

Peter Moore moves back to the Bay Area to head up EA Sports, comments on the role all those broken 360s had.

For well over a year, ever since Microsoft's J Allard and Robbie Bach started concentrating more on the company's Zune music player, Peter Moore has been the public face of Microsoft. Now the Brit is packing it up, moving down the coast from Microsoft's Redmond campus in Washington to California, where he'll spend more time with his family. Oh, and run EA Sports as well.

The announcement came on Tuesday following rumours seeping out after last week's E3 conference. In an interview with Microsoft community manager Larry Hryb, Moore said that he was keen to move his family back to San Francisco, where he has lived most of his time while in the US.

The official line from Microsoft is that Moore is moving back to the San Francisco Bay Area for "personal reasons".

Some of those reasons are likely to include the millions of dollars Moore stands to make at EA. Filings with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, picked up by several sites on Tuesday, show that Moore was promised a signing bonus of $1.5 million (dependent on a two-year stay at EA), a $500,000 salary and other forms of remuneration.

Replacing Moore at Microsoft is games industry veteran Don Mattrick, who himself previously worked for EA, as head of Worldwide Studios in the latest capacity.

"Don is well-known and respected throughout the industry for his deep knowledge, technical expertise and management savvy," Microsoft's Bach said in a statement. "Under Don's leadership, the games team is looking forward to embarking on our biggest holiday ever, with a wide-ranging roster of some of the most highly anticipated titles."

Moore said in the interview with Hryb that the move was unrelated to anything that happened to Microsoft in the previous weeks, alluding to the company's admission that it was having reliability problems with the Xbox 360.

Alex Wollenschlaeger
Editor, Kikizo