Christuserloeser, we've been over this before, and yes, that's all to do with Moore, but nothing to do with previous MS dealings. Moore's actual motivation could be a number of things as I said already. (including several different possible perspectives tied to the Xbox -including thinking it was going to be th ebig thing to jump on and Sega had better do it as fast as possible)
SoJ always had ultimate control over what occured, and from soem of Moore's quote, it seems more like Japan had already made up its mind (which makes sense given the very limited Japanese markat share they had in Japan -a constant 3rd behind Sony and Nintendo from 1998 on -though the Xbox was far worse) and that it simply came down to Moore to decide how to handel the western discontinuation.
In honesty, it didn't make all that much sense, at least in hindsight as Sega seemed ill prepared to make an abbrupt leap to 3rd part and floundered for quite a while bouncing from console to console without consistent multiplatform development and increasingly alienating their previous PC market.

