“Microsoft Killed A Killer Project” – Sood On Cross-Platform Gaming

Rahul Sood, founder of Voodoo PC and CTO of the gaming division at HP, has said Microsoft were responsible for killing cross-platform gaming.
In a post on his blog, Sood said the goal was to “bridge Xbox gamers with PC gamers so they could play against one another” and that it was all part of the initial Xbox LIVE strategy.
Sood believes had Microsoft implemented and supported this project, PC gaming might be “in a much better position”.
“There was a project that got killed at Microsoft. This project was designed to allow console gamers and PC gamers to interact and battle over a connected environment.”
Rahul claims the reason behind scrapping the development was because PC gamers had a huge advantage over console gamers because of the hardware used.
“I’ve heard from reliable sources that during the development they brought together the best console gamers to play mediocre PC gamers at the same game… and guess what happened? They pitted console gamers with their ‘console’ controller, against PC gamers with their keyboard and mouse.
“The console players got destroyed every time. So much so that it would be embarrassing to the XBOX team in general had Microsoft launched this initiative. Is this why the project was killed Who knows, but I’d love to hear from anyone involved — what happened?”
Sood believes had Microsoft continued to develop this cross-platform gaming, it would have given itself some breathing space and “allowed Microsoft to get away from the hardware business and focus on their core, software.
“Perhaps we could have finally integrated the Xbox into the PC…”
Sood also believes the future of gaming lies in web-based games, dubbing this as webOS, urging developers to think about taking advantage of all the technology currently available and developing for a universal, web-based platform. Of course, it’s unlikely this will happen unless the big boys get a share in webOS and find more ways to make money from it, but the ideology is certainly worth considering.
We’re dropped Microsoft a mail to find out if it’ll spill any beans. We’re not hopeful, but we’ll see if we can get anything out of them.