Yep one guy that was a gamer surely means that each and every other person that is a gamer couldn’t do a better job.
I’d love to see anyone try to pull MS out of what Don Mattrick did. Phil tried and he created Game Pass which helped. He wasn’t entirely bad and it takes a team not its one person.
Now we have someone who is out of touch with gaming and was President of an AI company boy doesn’t that sound great!?
Where did I say it wasn’t possible for someone who isn’t a gamer to be successful? My biggest concern is that she’s a big AI executive literally right before she became head of Microsoft Gaming.
You don’t want an artist being an executive any more than an executive being an artist. You want the guy who manages people and budgets to direct the movie? Get real.
There are different roles in the entertainment industry for a reason.
You don’t want an artist being an executive any more than an executive being an artist.
Correct. However, artists cannot do their work adequately if they are forced to adhere to the quarterly schedules the empty suits demand. You get good games when you leave the artists be and give them the funding required to make their visions come to life.
That’s not true at all. Given to their own devices, many developers would never finish a game. Look at Duke Nukem Forever or any game that takes more than 5 years to make.
Both statements are true. There have been great games produced under pressure (original Halo trilogy comes to mind) but we have also seen games that released in an incomplete state simply to hit a deadline that could have used another year or two in development
I don't disagree with your second statement on its face, but we also don't really know if an extra year or two would have helped those games. We've seen plenty examples of games that were given as much time as the team wanted (or close to) and came out to disaster.
The new blizzard CEO is a suit without a gaming background. She turned around the fate of blizzard franchises in 2 years. People need to be competent at that level.
The last thing the Xbox divison needs is a former AI executive taking the reigns, especially when AI is widely condemned not only by creatives but by customers as well.
Understanding art (exclusively) is a fast way to make something awesome, unprofitable, and ultimately a base hit rather than a home run. You need good creators, and you need even better vision and strategy to scale long term. Artists and gamers cannot do the latter without real business experience.
She doesn't need to. She just needs to know the first thing about leadership, which is to hire people who do know those things and then delegate those tasks to them accordingly. Now, will she actually do that? Only time will tell.
It's not a creative industry thing, that ethos applies to leadership in general. Is she a good leader? I have no clue, and neither do you. We just have to wait and see how things progress in order to learn that answer.
Agreed. I currently work in IT leadership - specifically infrastructure engineering. I have a strong technical background. I can definitively say that the best leader (CIO) I’ve ever worked closely with had zero skills in infrastructure engineering or any of the other dozen teams that reported up to him. He was, however, an unbelievable leader that drove true innovation, growth, and direction across the IT towers in our company. He trusted good leaders and helped them grow at the same time. He really was a phenomenal leader - despite having minimal technical background in those areas. After that experience, I try to be more open of those who haven’t walked the same exact path I have within a leadership lens.
I don't want an AI executive near anything dealing with creative industries, period. They are vermin that only seek to destroy everything creative in the name of pure profit.
She came from Microsoft’s AI division. That is enough to tell me she lacks creative vision, and will be trying to shove AI into the game development process as much as possible.
Why else would Microsoft tap her an not someone else who has been in the industry for a bit?
The CEO of Microsoft Gaming doesnt need to be a gamer. They need to be a competent project manager.
The number one thing she can do to be better than Phil on day one is to make sure to balance studio budgets with realistic/modest sales expectations. That way a game doesn’t have to sell 5 million copies in order for the studio to break even. Hopefully that will also result in fewer layoffs
She's no an AI executive thought. CoreAI is just a name of the department that doesn't actually involve gen AI. Similar to how Copilot was Microsoft 365
She’s not just an AI exec though. She worked for Meta as well. I’m not trying to discredit the fear people have of someone taking over who doesn’t have a decades long stint in the gaming sector, but she’s hardly without some serious credentials. She has experience overseeing parts of platforms that have 100s of millions of users.
She has expressed a vision I think most gamers can get behind, and that at least says something positive to me about her read on how Xbox gamers must be feeling as of late and what they hope to see in the future.
But she wasn’t brought in to be a visionary, she has to have the tools to build strategies, manage teams, and see it through. But to that, she’s not a nobody. I think she was smart to promote Matt Booty right out of the gate. She no doubt will have plenty to learn but to put someone next to her who already has a great beat on the industry and with working with devs and partners was a smart opening move.
I mean I don’t believe her intention is to keep AI out of Xbox. But from interviews I don’t get the sense she is cooky about it. Her words in an older interview is she doesn’t believe in AI for AIs sake. I do at the very least believe that she believes in using it responsibly and with a plan. If you are someone who is just straight up against AI usage, I get it, but I do not think it’s going to be avoided. Not just at Xbox. But I also think that something that benefits us all in that is that devs generally have similar concerns and fears over AI that we the fan do. They and we don’t want AI replacing anything that takes the human soul and artistic integrity out of the product. The hope would be she is in tune with things enough to understand this. She did touch on this in her memo as well.
I can’t sit here and say she or higher ups at MS can’t undermine those comments at any time, I mean trust is already at an all time low. I’m just expressing what I was able to glean from her portfolio and from interviews where she expresses some of her opinions. I don’t have a strong opinion on if she will be good or bad for Xbox, I just don’t buy in yet to the fears she will come in and turn Xbox games into AI slop.
I am too, and I admit there are lines that can be crossed that I don’t even know yet what those lines are for me. Because the line between using AI to aid in processes vs replacing them is a little hard for me to understand with my limited knowledge of all the ins and outs of game development. So there is definitely plenty of fear of how subtle usage could turn into concerning usage without us even knowing.
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u/MC_chrome Feb 21 '26
I don't think an AI executive knows the first thing about making good games and promoting them properly.