• Sarah Bond Promoted to Xbox President 
• Matt Booty is the new president of Game Content and Studios
• Chris Capposela steps down from Microsoft

Now that Microsoft has successfully closed the deal on acquiring Activision Blizzard King for close to $70 billion dollars, they aren't resting on their laurels of buying one of gaming's biggest developers/publishers. A shakeup within the company's gaming and marketing division has occurred, with an eye towards sharpening their mission statement and roadmap in the video games department. According to The Verge, CEO of Microsoft Gaming Phil Spencer sent an internal memo highlighting the grand restructuring of Xbox as a platform.

Sarah Bond will be promoted to Xbox President, which will entail overseeing all hardware and platform work. Sarah played a large part throughout the Activision Blizzard King acquisition in explaining Xbox's business model and video games to Judge Jaqueline Scott Corley.

"Sarah Bond will lead this team as President of Xbox — bringing together Devices, Player & Creator Experiences, Platform Engineering, Strategy, Business Planning, Data & Analytics and Business Development", Spencer elaborates.

Matt Booty, who was once known as Head of Xbox Game Studios, has upgraded to President of Game Content and Studios, essentially overseeing the work from ZeniMax and Bethesda. This new position will aid in preventing matters like the development cycle and release of Arkane's Redfall.

"ZeniMax will continue to operate as a limited integration entity led by Jamie Leder, President and CEO, reporting to Matt", Spencer states, as part of the memo. "All ZeniMax development studios and ZeniMax Central Services teams will continue reporting to Jamie to maintain and optimize current content development and production cycles. Also, to deepen our partnership and accelerate mutual learning, a number of ZeniMax leaders will now report to those Microsoft leaders with whom their work most closely aligns."

The restructured tree of command at Xbox now currently looks like this:

Bobby Kotick, CEO of Activision Blizzard, will answer to Spencer and aid in the transition until the Spring of 2024, wrapping up a 30 year tenure. Speaking of departures, Chris Capposela will step away as Microsoft Chief Marketing Officer after 32 years. In his place will be Takeshi Numoto, heading Xbox's Cloud technology.

"...He’s a fantastic systems thinker who works end-to-end across all functions from engineering to finance to operations to sales, and he’s built a great team of marketing leaders", spoke Satya Nadella in a press release. "I’m thrilled for him to step into the CMO role for Microsoft and drive our vision forward."

SOURCE: The Verge

Phil Spencer's full memo can be read here.