SEGA America President Peter Moore Quits, Joins Microsoft and Xbox

The last day has been absolutely crazy, with SEGA announcing that its head of American operations had resigned... only for him to join Microsoft instead to lead the charge with sales and marketing of its Xbox console!

Peter Moore, as President and Chief Operating Officer of SEGA of America, led the US marketing efforts with the Dreamcast - SEGA's last home console. He now looks to be doing a similar job for Microsoft, which seems to make sense given the similarities between the two consoles.

Moore leaves SEGA as the company appears to be hurting from poor sales of a number of key titles, which forced it to slash its profit forecast for the fiscal year (from $148.4 million to just $41.2 million). According to CNET, the bulk of that lack of performance seems to be the fault of its NFL2K3 American football game, which SEGA heavily promoted but saw few sales.

Tetsu Kayama, the overall Chief Operating Officer for SEGA, will take over as SEGA of America in Moore's place, effective immediately.

Microsoft announced Moore's appointment through a press release, which notes that he "will oversee retail business in the Home and Entertainment Division, including the Xbox video game console, Xbox and PC games from Microsoft Game Studios, and home software and hardware products sold at retail, in Europe and Japan."

Best of luck to Peter! And hopefully SEGA can right the ship with its upcoming batch of third-party games!