Peter Moore: We dropped Xbox 1 because the hard drive "killed us"

Peter Moore's revealed that Xbox's hard drive cost $70 per unit, and was the main reason the machine was prematurely dropped in favour of Xbox 360.

"Not having a hard drive in every Xbox 360 was a hard decision, but we wanted to get price under control," he said. "The hard drive in every Xbox killed us; we we're still selling it at $199 and the hard drive was like $70. That's why we prematurely left the original Xbox, because the more we were selling – there was still great demand – it was killing us, and there was no way to bring the price down.

"So in the end we determined at around the 25 million unit mark that we just needed to slow this thing down and just not sell any more, and move to the 360 as quickly as we possibly could. And to this day people still believe we left the Xbox too early but it was purely for financial purposes."

Moore made the comments in the third part of an ongoing Guardian interview. Which you'd be daft not to read.