Electronic Arts’ chief competition officer Peter Moore will be leaving the company to join the Liverpool Football Club. Moore will take over as the club’s chief executive officer both the team and EA confirmed today.
Moore joined EA in 2007 as the head of EA Sports. He was promoted to EA’s chief operating officer in 2011. Most recently Moore was tabbed to head EA’s Competitive Gaming Division – focused on creating eSports opportunities for the company’s franchises – in 2015.
Before joining EA, Moore worked at Microsoft as the head of the Xbox division from 2003 to 2007. It was during this time he became well known as the host of Microsoft’s E3 press conferences. He twice revealed tattoos on stage at E3: first to announce the Halo 2 release date and then again to announce Grand Theft Auto IV.
Moore got his start in video games at Sega of America and was a major figure at the company during the Dreamcast era. A popular myth – based on a 2008 interview with Moore in The Guardian – was that he decided Sega would leave the hardware business. Moore later clarified this was not the case in a 2011 interview with Eurogamer. “We had all agreed – maybe a half a dozen people in the corporation around the world – of what we needed to hit for the platform to continue to be viable going into 2001, and we simply didn’t hit those numbers,” said Moore in the interview. Moore also took the brunt of the criticism for cancelling the U.S. release of Shenmue 2 on the Dreamcast. The backlash was so severe he penned an apology letter for the game’s fans.
Moore will continue working for EA until for the next several weeks according to an EA blog post by CEO Andrew Wilson. He will begin work with Liverpool FC in June according to the team website.
