Yeah, this is an important piece of the puzzle. Guess we have to wait a bit longer to find out about that though.
Ybarra is probably a good bet, but who knows there might be too much bagage there. Or not.
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I think they just split up ABK, there is no longer a reason to have someone at the top of the three organizations. Each one is big enough and already has its own president.
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Iām in favor of that too. If they could structure that to work it would be the best solution.
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itās good that they are doing this because when MS moves they move a bit slowly so to have Phil lead all of gaming means they can move faster without being shackled to the mothership too much
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Couple things that jump out to me:
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Huge promotion for Sarah Bond, and definitely not unwarranted. She was the one that lead negotiations with Ubisoft that, in essence, saved the ABK acquisition. This, among her other work for the platform including Game Passās recent momentum have been highly visible and valuable to us end users. One thing that worries me is that her expanded remit will kind of necessarily mean she has less time to focus on platform partnerships and Game Pass. Game Pass has been on such a tear recently and I hope she has the support team in place to help keep that going.
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Zenimax getting more integrated is a great thing. I love that Phil called out āshared learningā in this memo in regards to that. Too often I see mistakes repeated in organizations where learnings from prior missteps should have been applied to prevent those mistakes (not a problem unique to Xbox/Zenimax, of course). Congrats to Matt Booty on his promotion here.
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HUGE vote of confidence in the Microsoft Gaming leadership team to move all of the Consumer Sales Organization (Includes Surface, HoloLens (RIP), and Windows (consumer), among other things). Having Surface more closely aligned with Xbox gives me a ton of hopium that weāll see an Xbox-branded 1st party PC handheld at some point.
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Kareem Choudhry, now with the title of CVP Xbox Emerging Technologies means the acquisition-related sandbagging of XCloud ends today. I think we see much renewed investment in cloud streaming of games from here on out.
Overall this looks like a great reorganization and will obviously be the first of a couple in the next few years as Xbox works to integrate ABK into the fold.
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But the thing is, it did say the card got redeemed, itās odd. He still has the 2 euros from last time on it, but not the additional 10 euros.
https://x.com/klobrille/status/1717586298880360538?s=46&t=O_AGT9SEnlptKOF_2SxtqQ
Xbox is basically Cinder right now.
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Maybe the marketing is exploding faster than I expected.
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https://x.com/idlesloth84_/status/1717582757642047772?s=46&t=O_AGT9SEnlptKOF_2SxtqQ
Surreal to see Series X|S on a FF title.
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The absolute second that the ABK acquisition closed all the sandbagging across Xbox got nixed.
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SEGA fangirl Sarah Bond getting more power?
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Just like the good old days again 
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All three versions heās testing it seems.
No black level raise, in fact, slightly black level crush. But he rather have the latter than the former and I wholeheartedly agree. Specular highlights could be better.
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I tried saying for a while that they were in lockdown mode until ABK was done. That included really pushing marketing. They wanted regulators to see them at their āworstā
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I appreciate this breakdown very much, and really hope youāre on the mark here!
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And there it is, that anticipated Microsoft would get more involved with Zenimax move. Damn good to see!
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Seems like Microsoft is gonna go hard into gaming which you just love to see. AI and gaming among cloud seem like their big pushes.
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