Overview
- Xbox CEO Asha Sharma confirmed on Wednesday that Matthew Ball will join as chief strategy officer, Scott Van Vliet will become chief technology officer, and Chris Schnakenberg has been promoted to corporate vice president of partnerships and business development.
- Ball will report directly to Sharma and has been given an initial mandate to strengthen Xbox’s console business, which faces rising memory and storage costs and declining unit share.
- Van Vliet is charged with improving how Xbox builds products so engineering teams can move faster and deliver higher quality releases, and he will formally start after the Showcase while ramping up immediately.
- Schnakenberg’s promotion centralizes third‑party publisher and developer relationships under a single leader to smooth partner negotiations and pipeline planning.
- The hires follow Sharma’s earlier rebrand to Xbox, Game Pass pricing moves, and other CoreAI hires and signal a focused organizational reset designed to stabilize hardware work on Project Helix and sharpen subscription and platform strategy.