Craig Duncan took cost of Xbox Recreation Studios in October 2024.
Xbox Recreation Studios seems set to search out its third chief within the house of two years amid experiences that Microsoft’s gaming division is making ready one other main spherical of layoffs. The present Xbox Recreation Studios head Craig Duncan, who took up the post in October 2024, is stepping down this week, in keeping with a memo obtained by The Game Business.
Duncan’s groups — which embody Halo Studios, The Coalition, Playground Video games, Uncommon, Obsidian, Ninja Idea and Double Superb — will report on to Matt Booty, Xbox’s chief content material officer, till a substitute is appointed. Louise O’Connor, who grew to become Xbox Recreation Studios chief of employees final yr, can be stated to be transferring on.
Duncan and O’Connor are departing days after Booty and Xbox CEO Asha Sharma sent an ominous public memo to employees that mentioned a “reset” of the enterprise after a decline in income. The memo highlighted elevated prices of {hardware} elements and competitors from different types of leisure for gamers’ consideration as different elements for concern. The executives additionally asserted that Xbox was “over prolonged” after snapping up so many studios over the past 10 years or so, claiming that “we’ve got not adequately funded them to compete and win.”
Booty and Sharma despatched the memo simply as Bloomberg reported Xbox is making ready for an additional spherical of mass layoffs. It is anticipated that the layoffs will start after Microsoft’s present fiscal yr ends on June 30. Microsoft slashed round 1,900 jobs in its gaming division in early 2024. In early July 2025, it stated it was chopping 9,000 jobs throughout the corporate. Lots of these had been inside Xbox, which canceled several games and closed a studio.
When requested at a conference final week in regards to the memo Sharma and Booty shared, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella stated, “The problem now for us is to consider how do you innovate each in {hardware} in addition to within the video games going ahead, in an economically viable manner.” He added that, after 25 years of Microsoft investing in Xbox, “now we’ve got to show this right into a sustainable enterprise.”
