A star in the games business Twitter circuit, investor and analyst Matthew Ball has made waves in the industry over recent years with his "State of Video Gaming" slideshows, which in some corners have become doctrinal explanations for gaming's 2020s woes.
Now Ball has the chance to put his analysis directly to work at one of the biggest gaming companies on the planet: Xbox CEO Asha Sharma brought him on as chief strategy officer not long before initiating her "Xbox reset," which will result in 3,200 layoffs and see multiple studios cut loose.
Speaking to The Game Business after he was hired (before this week's "reset"), Ball said that step one for Xbox is shoring up its console business. But new Gears of War games are unlikely to achieve Sharma's ambitious goal to entertain "more than a billion people each day." So what's the plan?
The big-picture Xbox strategy hasn't been shared (and is surely still developing), but Ball's histo...
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