It's no secret that Xbox has been pushing a move further and further into cloud gaming for a while, with the feature becoming a core part of Game Pass these days too. Well, in a new interview with IGN, former Xbox boss Peter Moore reckons that Microsoft "would love" if things moved away from consoles and purely towards the cloud.
When asked about whether he thinks the current generation of consoles could be the last, Moore had this to say on where the big platform holders are right now:
"Well, it's a great question already. PS5 saying, yeah, maybe we could sunset this thing, but no mention of a PS6. Now look, Sony is very much a hardware company, so I would say that that's your barometer company. Microsoft, not so much. Microsoft I'm sure would love it if everything moved into the cloud.
But I think it's a real serious question that's being asked I'm sure in Tokyo, in Redmond, Washington, in Kyoto. That's what everybody's working on right now, because when you start off that next generation, you've got to be ready to absorb billions of dollars in losses. And is the industry, given all the layoffs and everything we're going through right now, is the industry ready for that?"
Moore certainly makes a good point regarding the state of the industry at the moment. Both Microsoft and Sony have laid off hundreds of staff in 2024 - not to mention the myriad other gaming companies doing similar things right now.
As always, only time will tell where we are in a couple of years when a new console generation is expected to arrive. Last month, Microsoft certainly sounded serious about one when it said it was hoping to deliver "The Largest Technical Leap" ever with its next console.