Perhaps not so unexpected news arrives from the upper floors of Microsoft. A few days after Asha Sharma and Matt Booty's message on the "XBOX reset", Craig Duncan, leader of XBOX Game Studios and former head of Rare, has in fact announced that he will officially leave his post during this week, concluding a tenure that lasted twenty months. However, Duncan's is not the only important farewell that will hit the management of the division in the coming days.

Together with Duncan, in fact, the Chief of Staff Louise O'Connor is also preparing to say goodbye to the company. At this time of transition, and pending the identification of an official successor for the vacant position, the management and supervision of the department will temporarily pass into the hands of Matt Booty, current XBOX Chief Content Officer. Duncan joined the company in 2011, spending the majority of his career leading Rare, before taking responsibility for Microsoft's entire portfolio of first-party teams.

Louise O'Connor's career is also historically linked to Rare, a studio in which she has been active since 1999 and where she remained until the cancellation of Everwild in 2025. Later, in September of the same year, he took on the role of Chief of Staff for XBOX Game Studios. Greeting the teams, Duncan wanted to express his pride in the results achieved in the last twenty months, recalling that his primary goal has always been to serve the studios and the people behind the games, encouraging successful launches and consolidating the cultural identity of the various teams. Finally, the executive spent words of strong gratitude for O'Connor herself, describing her as a creative and trusted partner who supported the development of video games with extreme clarity and care.

These are probably just the first shocks of an earthquake that will overwhelm XBOX in a few weeks, in July: we hope for a less painful operation possible for the families of the employees involved, and that will leave us with an XBOX that is truly able to compete head-on on the market. We'll see!