New Leadership Appointments and XBOX Division

This message was just sent to Team XBOX employees globally.

At Town Hall on Tuesday, I talked about the four Cs and the choices we are making to put them into practice. You’ve seen a lot of our work on Core and Content. Today I want to share two leadership appointments supporting Creator and Connection. Kayleen Walters will transition from her role at Mojang to President of XP, a new XBOX division focused on how people experience our franchises beyond the games themselves, and Maria Angelidou-Smith will join XBOX as CEO of Mojang and Minecraft. Both will report to me.

Kayleen has spent her career building entertainment franchises. Before XBOX, she spent 13 years at Lucasfilm helping guide Star Wars across films, products, and partnerships. At Minecraft, she helped grow consumer products into a multibillion-dollar business with more than 250 licensees and was Executive Producer of A Minecraft Movie, the biggest film in the U.S. last year and a top-five release worldwide. She is also a producer of the sequel.

XP is a play on “Experience Points” and formalizes four investment areas for us: XBOX PICTURES for film and television adaptations; XBOX PRODUCTS for licensing and merchandise; XBOX PARTNERSHIPS for sponsors and brand partners; and XBOX PLACES for our marquee broadcast and in-person events, theme parks, and other location-based experiences. Our franchises can mean more to people than the time they spend playing them, and Kayleen knows how to build those experiences with the industry without losing what made people care about the franchise in the first place.

Kayleen’s move also gave us time to think carefully about what Mojang needs in its next leader.

Minecraft is one of the largest communities in entertainment. Hundreds of millions of people play, build, create, teach, watch, mod, run servers, and build businesses around Minecraft. The community doesn’t just consume the product. It helps shape what the product becomes. That was central to our search. Mojang already has an exceptional game development team that knows Minecraft and its players deeply. We wanted someone who has built products for communities at enormous scale, who is deeply technical, and who understands how creators, product, technology, and monetization come together.  

Maria brings a rare combination of those experiences. She spent nearly a decade at Meta, where she led Facebook Groups used by more than 1.8 billion people each month, as well as Events, Creators, Search, Profile, and Monetization. She later led product and technology at Personio and served as Chief Product Officer at Reddit, another of the world’s largest community platforms. She has built products used by billions of people and led product and engineering organizations through significant growth and change.

Maria brings deep experience to Mojang, along with a respect for what makes Minecraft special. Her first priority will be learning from the teams and communities who know Minecraft best. She starts Monday, October 19.

Please join me in congratulating Kayleen and welcoming Maria to XBOX!