Xbox’s massive leadership restructuring in the wake of closing the deal on the Bethesda acquisition is an endeavor the company hopes will prevent future messy game releases, like the infamous Redfall one from this past May.
The changes were reportedly announced via a company-wide memo, which listed former VP Sarah Bond as the new president of Xbox and Matt Booty as the new president of Game Content and Studios at Microsoft. Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer wrote in the memo that going forward, Booty will be directly overseeing Bethesda and the other developers under the ZeniMax banner now owned by Microsoft.
That includes Arkane Studios, the critically acclaimed developers of popular titles like Dishonored, Prey, and Deathloop. However, Arkane made its first major miss with this year’s Redfall, which was panned by critics at launch due to performance issues, bugs, an unsatisfying gameplay loop, and an overall frustrating lack of polish. The game’s player pool dropped off almost immediately, and hasn’t been able to bring players back even with some substantial post-launch updates.
The game was received so poorly that Xbox heads, including Spencer, went on an effective apology tour afterwards, saying that the game did not live up to the expectations that Arkane had set for itself. But reports regarding the development process at Arkane indicated that the game was perhaps doomed to fail prior to release anyway.
A June Bloomberg report pointed to a tremendous lack of direction and resources regarding Redfall, and noted that Microsoft was almost competently hands-off, hardly getting involved even after the acquisition. Bloomberg also noted that employee overturn was rampant at the Arkane Austin studio, and 70 percent of employees that worked on Prey were gone by the time Redfall released.
The leadership changes announced recently indicate that Microsoft is positioning itself to be more involved with the development of games by its subsidiary developers.
