Matthew Ball, Xbox's new strategy chief, brings metaverse thinking to Microsoft's gaming reset

Microsoft hired investor and analyst Matthew Ball as Xbox's chief strategy officer shortly before CEO Asha Sharma announced the so-called Xbox reset — a restructuring that includes 3,200 layoffs and multiple studio closures. Ball is best known in the industry for his annual State of Video Gaming slideshows and a 2022 book, The Metaverse: Building The Spatial Internet, revised in 2024, which lays out his vision for where interactive entertainment is heading.

In a conversation with The Game Business before the reset was announced, Ball said the immediate priority for Xbox is stabilising its console business. But Sharma's stated goal — entertaining more than a billion people every day — clearly demands something beyond new Gears of War sequels. Ball's background points toward where the bigger swings might come from: he co-founded the Roundhill Ball Metaverse ETF, an investment fund with positions in Roblox, Microsoft, Nvidia, Coinbase, and major publishers, and he co-founded Prosimetrum, a UGC gaming studio building content for Fortnite, Roblox, and Minecraft. A source familiar with the matter says Ball is a passive partner at Prosimetrum, not an operational decision-maker. Also connected to that company is Jacob Navok — former Square Enix director of business development, current CEO of AI firm Genvid, and someone who has publicly argued that Gen Z loves AI slop.

Ball defines the metaverse in his book as "a massively scaled and interoperable network of real-time-rendered immersive virtual worlds that can be experienced synchronously and persistently by an effectively unlimited number of users with an individual sense of presence, and with continuity of data, such as identity, history, entitlements, objects, communications, and payments." In plain terms: the persistent virtual world from Snow Crash or Ready Player One, but real. Ball acknowledges in the book that skeptics have had a real basis for their skepticism — Facebook's Meta rebrand and Zuckerberg's VR avatar were widely mocked, NFTs collapsed in credibility, VR and AR headsets never displaced traditional screens, and the metaverse hiring boom ended in mass layoffs across tech. Still, Ball writes that he is certain the future will be increasingly centered around real-time-rendered 3D virtual worlds. His presence at Xbox suggests Tim Sweeney's Fortnite-as-platform model and Roblox's user-generated ecosystem are likely reference points for whatever strategy Sharma is building.

The full Xbox strategy hasn't been made public and is almost certainly still taking shape. What's clear is that Ball's hire signals Xbox is thinking well beyond the traditional console-and-exclusive playbook — whether the gaming community will welcome that direction is another question entirely.