Yoinked from Slashdot comes this interesting blog post from Rahul Sood, CTO of HP's gaming business, in which he discusses how a project at Microsoft that aimed to pit Xbox gamers against PC gamers was axed because - well, you can probably guess why (if you're a PC gamer, anyway):

There was a project that got killed at Microsoft. This project was designed to allow console gamers and PC gamers to interact and battle over a connected environment. Personally I wish it would have stayed the course. I've heard from reliable sources that during the development they brought together the best console gamers to play mediocre PC gamers at the same game... and guess what happened? They pitted console gamers with their "console" controller, against PC gamers with their keyboard and mouse.

The console players got destroyed every time. So much so that it would be embarrassing to the XBOX team in general had Microsoft launched this initiative. Is this why the project was killed Who knows, but I'd love to hear from anyone involved --- what happened?

The rest of the article rambles on about developing more PC games for Palm's webOS (wat?!) but it's an interesting read.

Everyone knows that PC takes more skill than conslols. Thats why the majority of people play conslols because most people are s***ty noobs.

urgh, i was hoping you guys would intentionally not post this so we didn't have to have another lame controller vs mouse and keyboard discussion.

I was sort of hoping this would help put an end to it (assuming what he says is true). It seems so utterly obvious to me as a predominantly PC gamer, but I would love for MS to actually publish some sort of report saying that they tried it and man, did it suck

yeh i could f*** ne scrub up with a console controller with my leeches razor mantos keyboard + mouse combo

I have never understood why there was ever any doubt as to which was superior. Like everyone here I have played consoles and of course pc games and to me the whole topic seems like the ultimate no brainer.

introduce mouse and keyboard compatibility for consoles, problem solvered.

Everyone knows that PC takes more skill than conslols. Thats why the majority of people play conslols because most people are s***ty noobs.

More like everyone who plays consoles just wants something a bit easier to use than a PC if all they do is game and watch media because they probably have a life and can't be bothered spending hours installing and configuring their games.

I have never understood why there was ever any doubt as to which was superior.

Because the console users who are serious about their gaming and have no life believe they have more skills because it's harder to control a character with the joysticks thus requiring more leetness and us PC users are noobs because we can just "point and click" instead of having to aim.

I wish they had left the project going so we'd get 1000000 console users all posting ban requests for every pc user accusing them of hacking in cs. ho ho ho

This is a question of equipment not skill. For skill to be in question you'd need a level playing field to test it and since both sides of the fence use totally differing methods of control this can't be done. The really sad thing here is that if this story is true it shows how pitifull Microsofts understanding of gaming really is because it's not something they would of needed to test to know what the answer is.

I don't see this issue being much different from what we saw 10 plus years ago with HPB's being cheap and easy kills for LPB's. The Low ping bastards swore it was their leet skills that made the difference, we all know that was total bs though. If you play on a server with a 200+ ping you are at a disadvantage in much the same way someone using a slow ass clumbsy game pad controler is.