by
William D’Angelo
, posted on 20 May 2026 / 3,236 Views
Xbox has hired two new executives to join the leadership team, according to The Game Business.
Video game industry analyst Matthew Ball has been hired as the Chief Strategy Officer. He previously worked as the head of strategy and planning for Amazon Studios and wrote the best-seller The Metaverse.
His first job will be to strengthen the console side of Xbox, which has struggled in recent years. Xbox has increased the price of its Xbox Series X|S consoles due to the rising cost of RAM and storage. He admits he is “pretty frightened” RAM shortages.
Scott Van Vliet, who previously led the teams at Azure OpenAI and AI Core infrastructure at Microsoft, has been hired as the Chief Technology Officer. He does have experience in games having worked on the Minecraft: Fire TV Edition, as well as at Amazon Game Studios.
His role at Xbox “will be to improve how Xbox builds products so teams can move faster and deliver stronger results.”
In addition to the two new hires, Xbox has promoted Chris Schnakenberg to Corporate Vice President, Partnerships & Business Development. He had spent 12 years at Activision Blizzard in multiple roles. His focus at Xbox will be third-party games, publishers and developers working with Xbox.
A life-long and avid gamer, William D’Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can follow the author on Bluesky.
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