IGN's Ryan McCaffrey recently interviewed three men who have helped shape Microsoft's video game legacy: Xbox designer Seamus Blackley, former Xbox 360 frontman Peter Moore, and current Xbox One headman Phil Spencer. While the entire hour-and-a-half discussion is an informative listen, sports fans will particularly want to hear the conversation from 19:08 to 22:45, where Peter Moore explains Microsoft's decision to drop-out of the sports gaming business shortly after signing a deal with Don Mattrick -- then President of Electronic Arts' Worldwide Operations -- to finally get EA's games onto Xbox Live. NCAA Football 2005 was Electronic Arts' first Xbox title to include online play, despite the fact that Microsoft's gaming network had been up and running since November of 2002.

"Our resources in Microsoft Game Studios were going to be better-deployed somewhere else. We kind of stepped away in the end, let EA get on with it, and we started to focus on different games. There was no animosity. It was just a simple business decision. You've got limited resources -- development studios that would be better-deployed doing things that could drive hardware [sales]. We let EA get after the sports genre. EA was good at that [and] is still good at that. We needed to do some different things. It just made no sense [for Microsoft] in the end. [Sports gaming] was a finite market, and we were splitting it, and the cost of licensing fees to the leagues and the players associations were going through the roof. It was better to just let EA do it, and we'll go put our studios on something else."

Original Xbox owners may remember that Microsoft Game Studios developed and published several interesting sports properties that were exclusive to Microsoft's system, including Forza Motorsport, NFL Fever, NHL Rivals, NBA Inside Drive and MLB Inside Pitch. Forza is Microsoft's only remaining yearly sports brand, just as Sony's MLB The Show series has become the sole survivor from a lineup that once included NFL Gameday, NBA Shootout, NHL Faceoff, NCAA Gamebreaker, NCAA Final Four and Jet Moto. Nintendo stopped publishing sports simulations a few years before the other first parties, only releasing NBA Courtside 2002 on the GameCube, and never greenlighting another baseball game after Ken Griffey Jr.'s Slugfest appeared on the Nintendo 64 in 1999. Exile Interactive did create a GameCube-exclusive MLB title called Pennant Chase Baseball, which was set to feature David Ortiz on the cover. However, at the last moment, Nintendo decided not to publish the game, even though it was completed, had passed certification, and was even playable in Nintendo's booth at E3 2005. Retro Studios was also working on an NFL game for the GameCube, but that project was cancelled in 2001 so that the studio could put all of its manpower into Metroid Prime, which turned out to be one of the best action-adventure games of all time.