Xbox has hired your favorite video game developer’s favorite industry analyst, Matthew Ball, as its new Chief Strategy Officer. As reported by The Game Business and confirmed via his LinkedIn, Ball is joining Xbox with the stated goal of strengthening its console segment, which is in dire straits due to global memory shortages, recent corporate upheaval at Microsoft, and unrelenting competition from Sony, Nintendo and, soon, Valve.
Ball is a venture capitalist and tech industry consultant with a well-documented history of analyzing emerging digital economies and the video game market. He was most recently the CEO and founder of Epyllion, an advisory firm and digital production house that also runs a large-scale metaverse investment fund, and he publishes regular breakdowns of the industry’s biggest players and trends, including an annual State of Gaming report. Ball is the author of The Metaverse, a book beloved by Tim Sweeney, Mark Zuckerberg, Karlie Kloss and, not awkwardly at all, former Xbox head Phil Spencer.
Microsoft shook up its longstanding Xbox leadership team in February, with Spencer and president Sarah Bond exiting, and Xbox Game Studios head Matt Booty being promoted to Chief Content Officer. Asha Sharma, former president of Microsoft’s CoreAI division, filled Spencer’s old role as CEO of Microsoft Gaming. Since taking over, Sharma has cut Game Pass prices, teased a PC-console hybrid called Project Helix, and removed Microsoft’s Copilot AI assistant from the Xbox ecosystem. And now, she’s hired Ball to sort out Xbox’s fresh approach to hardware.
This year’s hierarchy changes came after another round of massive layoffs at Microsoft in July 2025, which heavily hit its gaming sector, resulting in multiple game cancellations and studio closures. This, of course, was after Microsoft spent a few years hungrily acquiring studios including Double Fine, Compulsion Games and ZeniMax Media, culminating with the courts-approved purchase of Activision Blizzard for $69 billion in 2023.
In another corporate shift, Microsoft’s former head of Azure OpenAI and AI Core infrastructure, Scott Van Vliet, is joining Xbox as Chief Technology Officer today. That move was first reported by The Game Business‘ article and confirmed on LinkedIn shortly after.
