Former Xbox boss Peter Moore says Gen Z may reject new consoles in favor of smartphones and PCs
Have we reached the «last console generation»? Former Xbox boss Peter Moore doesn't claim to know for sure, but he thinks it's a question that current Xbox head Phil Spencer must be asking, and he doesn't sound very confident that consoles in their current form will last much longer.
Moore himself was asking the same question in 2007—a couple years after the Xbox 360 released—he said in a recent interview with IGN. Back then, Microsoft was wondering whether TVs would start to «come with chips that can play games,» said Moore, or if a PC gaming renaissance was afoot (it was), and whether or not a new console generation was worth «hemorrhaging» cash to get into people's homes on the hope that game sales and Xbox Live subscriptions made up for it.
Microsoft obviously didn't stop making new Xboxes, but a lot has changed since then. Moore's observations on the habits of today's gamers are pretty typical—the kids these days want «snack-size stuff» like TikTok videos, he theorized, or they want to «gorge» on the limitless well of streaming TV, and single-purpose devices are old-fashioned—but he did characterize the past decade-and-a-half in a way I hadn't heard before: Entertainment has moved from the living room to the bedroom, said Moore, with the gaming audience leaving communal TV screens in favor of smartphones and PCs.
«And what are we doing? Well, we're not in the living room anymore,» said Moore. «We're back in the bedroom with our YouTube influencers, our TikTok creators, and it's about content on demand … Gen Z is coming through and they're going, 'Why do I need to spend four or 500 bucks on a bespoke piece of gaming hardware when I've got my smartphone, or I got my PC or my Mac, and I can do things there with a pretty decent controller?'»
When the next set of consoles release, gamers might say, «I don't need this, times are tough,» said Moore, reiterating that phones and PCs offer «plenty of games to play.» That's especially true now that so many former console
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