The new Xbox XP division is a team whose job isn’t making games. It puts film and TV, merchandise, brand deals, and live events under one roof, and Kayleen Walters is leaving her role at Mojang to run it as president. Mojang, meanwhile, is getting a CEO from outside the game industry: Maria Angelidou-Smith, a former Chief Product Officer at Reddit, starts Monday, October 19.
What XP covers
The name is a play on Experience Points. According to Xbox CEO Asha Sharma’s email to staff, XP splits into four groups. Xbox Pictures handles film and TV adaptations, Xbox Products runs licensing and merchandise, Xbox Partnerships covers sponsors and brand deals, and Xbox Places takes on big broadcast and in-person events, theme parks, and other location-based attractions.
None of this is brand new work. Xbox Chief Strategy Officer Matthew Ball wrote in his own post that XP pulls together teams that have existed across Xbox for years and gives them one shared mission, with games still at the center. Sharma tied the move to the “four Cs” she laid out at Tuesday’s town hall, the same meeting where she talked up the Helix family of devices. These two hires cover the Creator and Connection side of that plan.
Why Walters got the job
Walters spent 13 years at Lucasfilm helping steer Star Wars across films, products, and partnerships before she came to Minecraft. There, Xbox says, she grew consumer products into a multibillion-dollar business with more than 250 licensees, and she was an executive producer on A Minecraft Movie. She’s also a producer on the sequel.
Ball’s numbers explain why Xbox wants to repeat that playbook with its other series. During her time at Mojang, Minecraft went from 350 million copies sold to more than 425 million, the movie had the biggest opening weekend ever for a game adaptation, and Mojang landed its first theme park deal.
Mojang’s new boss comes from social platforms
Angelidou-Smith spent nearly a decade at Meta, where she ran Facebook Groups along with Events, Creators, Search, Profile, and Monetization. After that she led product and technology at Personio, then became Reddit’s Chief Product Officer. Sharma wrote that Mojang wanted someone who understands “how creators, product, technology, and monetization come together,” and said Angelidou-Smith’s first priority is learning from the teams and the community. Both she and Walters report directly to Sharma.
Nothing changes inside Minecraft today. Xbox didn’t announce any new projects, films, or game changes with this news, and the Switch 2 version is still set for October 27. The bigger change is in how Xbox talks about itself. Its biggest series now have a dedicated team for everything outside the game, and Sharma listed monetization among the things Mojang’s new CEO needed to understand, so that’s one area Minecraft players will be watching.