Xbox expands leadership team with major hires

Top industry analyst Matthew Ball joins as Chief Strategy Officer, while Scott Van Vliet is Chief Technology Officer

Xbox CEO Asha Sharma

Xbox has added two big names to its leadership team: Matthew Ball and Scott Van Vliet.

The new recruits are part of an on-going drive from Xbox CEO Asha Sharma to move faster, build better products, and make more focused business decisions.

The Game Business can reveal that Ball is joining as Chief Strategy Officer. He is a popular industry analyst who is responsible for the annual The State of Video Gaming report, which is widely read across the business.

His first job will be to strengthen the console side of Xbox, which is facing significant pressures, not least from the rising costs of memory and storage. In an interview with The Game Business earlier in the year, he admitted he was “pretty frightened” by the situation for the console sector.

Ball had previously worked as head of strategy and planning for Amazon Studios, and wrote the 2022 international best-seller The Metaverse. He is currently CEO of Epyllion, a venture partner at investment group Makers Fund and senior advisor at KKR & Co.

Xbox’s new Chief Strategy Officer Matthew Ball

Meanwhile, Scott Van Vliet joins as Chief Technology Officer. He was previously in charge of Azure OpenAI and AI Core infrastructure at Microsoft, and he also led engineering for Microsoft Teams during the COVID 19 pandemic. But he has a games background. He previously worked across games for Amazon, including Alexa, Amazon Game Studios and the Amazon App Store. He directly worked on the Minecraft: Fire TV Edition. Prior to that, he was VP of Digital Play at Mattel, and worked across brands such as Batman, Barbie, Angry Birds, Fruit Ninja and Cut The Rope.

His job will be to improve how Xbox builds products so teams can move faster and deliver stronger results.

In addition to these new hires, Xbox has promoted Chris Schnakenberg to Corporate Vice President, Partnerships & Business Development. He was previously VP of partnerships and business development, and joined from Activision Blizzard, where he spent 12 years in various strategy, business development and partner relations role. His focus is on third-party games, publishers and developers working with Xbox.

The news follows a number of new hires and promotions earlier in the month, including Jason Ronald taking leadership over Xbox’s upcoming Project Helix console.

“These changes are about strengthening our foundation by creating more clarity and improving execution,” Sharma said in an email to staff. “As we head toward Showcase and beyond, we’ll continue making the changes needed to position XBOX for the future.”

Matthew Ball is speaking with Christopher Dring at The Game Business Live on Monday, June 8. More details on the event can be found here.

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For years, events like Augmented World Expo 2026 were mostly about hardware demos, enterprise buzzwords, and at least one headset that looked vaguely uncomfortable to wear for longer than ten minutes. That has changed. As AWE USA 2026 prepares to return to Long Beach from June 15 through June 18, the event’s latest announcements show just how much the XR industry has evolved beyond “look at this cool prototype” territory. The expo is now positioning itself as an equal mix of technology conference, art festival, research summit, startup incubator, and cultural celebration for the growing spatial computing industry. And honestly, that may be exactly what XR needed.

This year’s event will introduce eight new members into the XR Hall of Fame, honoring decades of work that helped shape today’s immersive technology landscape. The 2026 inductees include motion tracking inventor Al Rodgers, VR artist Rebecca Allen, AR display analyst Karl Guttag, and The Lawnmower Man director Brett Leonard. Their work spans everything from early immersive storytelling and 360-degree video to safety standards and educational XR applications.

What stands out most about AWE’s latest announcements is how heavily the event is leaning into the human side of XR, and the inaugural AWE USA 2026 Art Festival may be the clearest example. The showcase features 15 immersive projects from creators across the globe, including four world premieres and several award-winning experiences. Projects range from interactive VR storytelling pieces to experimental mixed reality art installations. In a year where nearly every tech company seems determined to replace creativity with generative AI shortcuts, AWE’s focus on human-driven immersive storytelling feels refreshingly intentional.

The expo is also launching its first-ever Research Poster Track, bringing academic XR research directly onto the convention floor. Topics include neurofeedback gaming, mixed reality collaboration tools, rehabilitation systems, AI-enabled smart glasses, and immersive healthcare simulations. Instead of isolating research inside university labs, AWE appears determined to put researchers directly alongside developers, investors, and creators.

That same philosophy carries into the 2026 Startup Pitch Competition, where emerging companies will compete live during the show. Finalists include companies focused on smart glasses, surgical XR systems, immersive wellness platforms, and spatial AI technologies.

The broader message behind all of this is becoming pretty clear. Augmented Reality is no longer trying to prove it exists. The industry is now trying to prove it matters. With more than 250 exhibitors, 400 speakers, and roughly 5,000 attendees expected, AWE 2026 is shaping up to be less of a traditional trade show and more of a statement about where immersive technology is heading next. And for an industry that spent years trapped somewhere between tech demo and marketing gimmick, that is probably overdue.