Xbox wants to turn its biggest franchises into far more than games. We’ve known that for a while, but in a new company-wide email (available in its entirety on Xbox Wire), the explosive new CEO Asha Sharma has just announced XP, a new division focused on how people experience Xbox franchises beyond the games themselves.
The name is a play on Experience Points, of course. The division will focus on four main areas of investment:
- Xbox Pictures, covering film, television, and other forms of linear storytelling
- Xbox Products, covering licensing and merchandise
- Xbox Partnerships, covering sponsors, brands, and creator collaborations
- Xbox Places, covering broadcasts, live events, theme parks, and other location-based experiences
Leading XP as President is Kayleen Walters, who moves over from Mojang. Her resume makes the appointment an obvious fit: before joining Xbox, she spent 13 years at Lucasfilm helping guide Star Wars across films, products, and partnerships. At Minecraft, she grew consumer products into a multibillion-dollar business with more than 250 licensees, and served as executive producer of A Minecraft Movie, which Sharma notes was the biggest film in the US last year and a top-five release worldwide. She’s also a producer on the upcoming sequel.
The Ambition: Xbox as the Number One in Entertainment
Chief Strategy Officer Matthew Ball laid out the bigger picture in a separate blog post, stating that Xbox’s ambition is simply to become the number one entertainment company in the world. XP, he explained, brings together capabilities that have existed across various Xbox teams for years, aligning them around a shared mission to help its franchises reach more people.
Notably, XP isn’t a production company. According to The Hollywood Reporter, its role is to match Xbox’s IP with the right production partners, with the aim of replicating the success of adaptations like Fallout and A Minecraft Movie for Xbox’s biggest franchises, including Call of Duty, Warcraft, Gears of War, Candy Crush, Diablo, Forza, The Elder Scrolls, and Halo. In an email to her new team, Walters said fans don’t just play these franchises: “They watch them, wear them, attend them, celebrate them.”
There’s already plenty in the pipeline. Minecraft has a movie sequel (titled Minecraft Squared) in production, as well as a theme park planned for 2027. A Call of Duty movie from Taylor Sheridan and Peter Bergis in the works, Netflix has announced a Diablo animated series at BlizzCon 2026, and Fallout’s third season is on the way at Amazon. Even PHYSINT, the Hideo Kojima game Xbox picked up after Sony walked away, is already looking toward film and TV adaptations, just like their other joint project, the horror-themed OD.
Not everything has worked, of course. Paramount’s Halo series was a failure (even though the second season was an improvement over the first one), which arguably makes the case for a dedicated division to manage these adaptations more carefully.
A New CEO for Mojang
Walters’ move also left a vacancy at Mojang, which Sharma has already filled with Maria Angelidou-Smith as the new CEO of Mojang and Minecraft. She spent nearly a decade at Meta, where she led Facebook Groups, used by more than 1.8 billion people each month, along with Events, Creators, Search, Profile, and Monetization. She later led product and technology at Personio and served as Chief Product Officer at Reddit.
Sharma explained that Mojang already has an exceptional development team, so the search focused on someone deeply technical with experience building products for communities at an enormous scale. Angelidou-Smith’s first priority will be learning from the teams and communities who know Minecraft best. Both Walters and Angelidou-Smith will report directly to Sharma, in the latest sweeping decision made by the Xbox CEO since she joined the division in February.
About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief.
In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech’s gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews.
Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications.
His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.
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