Peter Moore, COO of Battlefield and Mass Effect publisher Electronic Arts, is expecting a “great fight” between Microsoft’s Xbox One and Sony’s PlayStation 4 this holiday. In an interview with GamesIndustry International, Moore said that while Sony may be currently enjoying its place as the king of consoles, a runaway leader is actually not in the best interest of the industry.

“I think it’s going to be a great fight in the holiday. And as a third-party publisher, we sit right in the sweet spot,” Moore said. “Consumers love it as well, and it’s good for the industry.”

“You need powerful companies like Sony and Microsoft to be battling out with each other because it drives investment in their platforms. It drives competition,” he added. “You want to see Nintendo come back with the Wii U. All in all, it becomes healthy for gamers, for the environment. When you have a runaway winner, that actually has a reverse effect.”

“You need powerful companies like Sony and Microsoft to be battling out with each other because it drives investment in their platforms” — Peter Moore

Moore’s comments came in response to a question regarding how much longer he expects the last-generation consoles (Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3) to hang around. He said EA is modeling around two or three years of continued support (so out until 2016-2017), though of course there could be exceptions like the PlayStation 2, which was supported–from EA and other publishers–for more than a decade.

“The hope is we get a decent tail of two or three years, and we’ll continue to make games for those platforms as long as fans buy them,” Moore said. “What PlayStation did with the PS2 was a wonderful tail. I was at Microsoft and we kind of buried the Xbox quickly because to be blunt, it was just losing money. We stopped making games for it ourselves and stopped manufacturing it because the view was, ‘Let’s move to Xbox 360. Let’s get there quickly, establish a beachhead before the PlayStation 3 came out,’ and that certainly worked well in that generation. You could argue maybe the tables have been somewhat turned in this generation.”

Last holiday, the Xbox One was priced at $500, a full $100 above Sony’s PS4. This season, however, there is price parity between the consoles, as both are available for $400. Microsoft’s gaming boss Phil Spencer previously congratulated Sony on the PS4’s 7 million consoles sold, but said it’s important to remember that we’re only about 10 percent of the way through this console generation.

Eddie Makuch is a news editor at GameSpot, and you can follow him on Twitter @EddieMakuch
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