Xbox’s new chief strategist is a metaverse true believer

A star in the games business Twitter circuit, investor and analyst Matthew Ball has made waves in the industry over recent years with his “State of Video Gaming” slideshows, which in some corners have become doctrinal explanations for gaming’s 2020s woes.

Now Ball has the chance to put his analysis directly to work at one of the biggest gaming companies on the planet: Xbox CEO Asha Sharma brought him on as chief strategy officer not long before initiating her “Xbox reset,” which will result in 3,200 layoffs and see multiple studios cut loose.

Speaking to The Game Business after he was hired (before this week’s “reset”), Ball said that step one for Xbox is shoring up its console business. But new Gears of War games are unlikely to achieve Sharma’s ambitious goal to entertain “more than a billion people each day.” So what’s the plan?

The big-picture Xbox strategy hasn’t been shared (and is surely still developing), but Ball’s history suggests that Tim Sweeney and Roblox will be major inspirations.

Ball is a big believer in “the metaverse.” He authored a book on the idea, “The Metaverse: Building The Spatial Internet,” which was published in 2022 and revised in 2024, and co-founded the Roundhill Ball Metaverse ETF, an investment fund with stakes in Roblox, Microsoft, Nvidia, cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, and a variety of major game publishers and tech firms.

Ball also co-founded a “UGC gaming studio” that says it’s creating virtual worlds for Fortnite, Roblox, and Minecraft. The company, Prosimetrum, is credited as the creator of Steal the Shark, a Fortnite island developed by Brazilian studio Dojo Maps.

Ball is a passive partner in the business, not a decision-maker, according to a source familiar with the matter. Also associated with Prosimetrum is former Square Enix director of business development Jacob Navok, who currently runs AI company Genvid and has argued that “Gen Z loves AI slop.”

The metaverse according to Ball

A universal definition of “metaverse” doesn’t really exist, but in his book, Ball describes it 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.”

Essentially, it’s the virtual world described by ’90s sci-fi novel Snow Crash, and more recently Ready Player One: A network of immersive virtual worlds in which everyone’s identity is persistent.

Ball does not suggest that this sci-fi vision will come to pass without friction—skeptics have had “a real basis for their skepticism,” he says in his book—and it’s certainly faced a lot of friction this decade.

Facebook’s 2021 rebranding as “Meta” and Mark Zuckerberg’s goofy VR avatar were mocked rather than embraced, NFTs were written off by many as worthless status symbols for gullible celebs and vectors for outright scams, VR and AR headsets have yet to sweep away old-fashioned screens, and after a metaverse hiring boom, the tech industry shed thousands of workers.

Above: Ball’s recent interview with The Game Business

But among metaverse true believers, it’s an inevitability, not just a dream. Ball concludes that he is “certain that the future will be increasingly centered around real-time-rendered 3D virtual worlds and networks” and predicts that computers and the internet “will evolve and be redesigned in support of the Metaverse.” (A thought that could influence future Xbox hardware.)

Similarly, Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney said in a 2024 conversation with Ball and Snow Crash author Neal Stephenson that, while a certain social media company’s attempt to get everyone working in chic virtual offices was “just totally lame,” the metaverse is the “inevitable future of real-time 3D in gaming.”

Epic continues to pursue its metaverse vision: The recently announced Unreal Engine 6 is all about helping developers link up their in-game economies and social features so that players can take friends and purchases from one game into another.

Hints at Xbox’s future

During his interview with The Game Business, Ball recalled Sharma asking him whether Xbox was “fixable.” His response: “I’m a strategic optimist. I think it is incredibly defeatist to think that there is any scenario that you can’t do better, that you can’t improve.”

So far, improvement has meant reduction: Aside from parting with four development studios and laying off thousands, Sharma has announced a desire to simplify Xbox’s management structure and to invest “with greater focus, greater discipline, and greater clarity.”

But Sharma also says that Microsoft is not reducing investment in Xbox, and there are hints about where the money will go (aside from toward getting The Elder Scrolls 6 out the door). The CEO said, for example, that rather than trying to own all the good indie studios, Xbox “will help independent creators succeed by providing open development tools and audiences to realize their vision.” There are echoes of Epic’s tools and platforms strategy in that remark.

Ball’s interest in the metaverse doesn’t necessarily mean that he was hired by Xbox to pivot the publisher toward that medium, but it stands to reason that the subject he dedicated book-length analysis to will feature in his advice. At the least, an increased focus on user generated content feels likely, and Microsoft could strengthen its relationship with Epic Games and Unreal Engine (“Fortnite is the future,” Ball wrote in 2019).

Regarding UGC, it is notable that Minecraft developer Mojang will now report directly to Sharma, as it’s the closest thing Microsoft has to Roblox.

For now, Ball has not hinted at any radical plans for Xbox’s future. He said in his Game Business interview that Xbox’s console business is “durable and valuable and important” and that upcoming shooter Gears of War: E-Day “looks terrific.”

In his book, however, he predicts that the metaverse will be with us quite soon, suggesting that if Xbox is going to take advantage of such a radical transformation—should it actually come to pass—it ought to get to work on it with urgency.

“Though skeptics will shape the discourse,” Ball wrote in his book, “I’d guess that by the end of the current decade many if not most of us will agree that the ‘Metaverse’ has begun (though even in hindsight, there will be no precise date of its start, nor will we be able to predict when it will arrive in full).”