Xbox appoints Matthew Ball as chief strategy officer, Scott Van Vliet as CTO
Xbox CEO Asha Sharma has appointed industry analyst Matthew Ball as chief strategy officer and Scott Van Vliet as chief technology officer, continuing a restructure of the company's leadership team announced earlier this month.
Ball, a venture partner and investor known for annual industry reports and a book on the metaverse, has been advising Xbox on strategy since the company's early planning stages. He starts this month and will report directly to Sharma.
Van Vliet joins from Microsoft, where he oversaw Azure AI infrastructure as a corporate vice president. His previous role involved leading product teams at Amazon that developed gaming platforms for Alexa, FireTV, and Android. At Xbox, he will focus on improving the product development pipeline.
Sharma also promoted Chris Schnakenberg to corporate vice president of partnerships and business development, overseeing third-party relationships with developers and publishers. Schnakenberg previously held a VP role in the same function after twelve years in strategy and partner roles at Activision Blizzard.
The company will make no changes to teams working on hardware or the next-generation Project Helix console, or the console operating system.
These moves follow a larger management reshuffle earlier in May, when Sharma appointed four new executives who had previously worked with her on Microsoft's CoreAI product and reassigned four existing leaders, including Helix hardware lead Jason Ronald.
Sharma said the changes aim to "strengthen our foundation by creating more clarity and improving execution," and pledged to "continue making the changes needed to position Xbox for the future."
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