Microsoft "prematurely left the original Xbox" due to the costs of the hard disc drive included in every unit, former Xbox executive Peter Moore has revealed.

"The hard drive in every Xbox killed us," Moore, now the president of EA Sports, told Guardian. "We were 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."

The original Xbox, which debuted in 2001, was replaced only four years after launch when the Xbox 360 arrived in 2005. Xbox 360 units can be bought with or without hard drives, and owners are able to buy larger hard drives from Microsoft, something that wasn't feasible with the original Xbox as the HDD was internal.

"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," Moore explained.