Xbox just handed its strategic future to one of the most committed metaverse believers in the games industry. Matthew Ball, investor, analyst, and author of The Metaverse: Building The Spatial Internet, has been brought on as Xbox's chief strategy officer by CEO Asha Sharma, joining the company shortly before she announced the so-called "Xbox reset" that includes 3,200 layoffs and the closure of multiple development studios.
Ball is not some random hire plucked from the business world. He spent years building a reputation in gaming circles through his detailed "State of Video Gaming" annual slideshows, which became required reading for anyone trying to make sense of why the industry has struggled through the mid-2020s. He co-founded the Roundhill Ball Metaverse ETF, an investment fund with positions in Roblox, Microsoft, Nvidia, Coinbase, and a wide range of major publishers. He also co-founded Prosimetrum, a user-generated content studio building virtual worlds inside Fortnite, Roblox, and Minecraft.
What Ball actually believes about the metaverse
Ball's definition of the metaverse is specific, and worth understanding if you want to read where Xbox might be heading. In his book, he describes it as a "massively scaled and interoperable network of real-time-rendered immersive virtual worlds" where identity, history, purchases, and social connections persist across platforms and sessions. Think Snow Crash or Ready Player One, but treated as an engineering roadmap rather than science fiction.
He is not naive about the friction. Facebook's 2021 rebrand to Meta and Zuckerberg's cartoonish VR avatar became a punchline rather than a blueprint. NFTs collapsed under the weight of speculation and outright fraud. VR headsets still haven't replaced flat screens for most people. Ball acknowledges that skeptics have had "a real basis for their skepticism," but he frames all of that as turbulence on a predetermined flight path, not evidence that the destination is wrong.
His conviction puts him in the same camp as Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney, who told Ball in a 2024 conversation that while certain social-media-company VR office experiments were misguided, the metaverse is "the inevitable future of real-time 3D in gaming." Unreal Engine 6, announced recently, is built around linking in-game economies and social features across titles so players can carry friends and purchases between games. That is a direct metaverse play, and it is not a coincidence that Ball wrote back in 2019 that "Fortnite is the future."
What this means for Xbox players right now
Here's the thing: Ball has not announced any radical pivot for Xbox. In a recent interview, he called the console business "durable and valuable and important" and said upcoming shooter Gears of War: E-Day "looks terrific." His stated priority for step one is stabilizing the console side of the business before anything else.
But the structural signals are hard to ignore. Sharma has said Xbox will support independent creators with open development tools rather than acquiring studios outright. Mojang, the closest thing Microsoft has to Roblox, now reports directly to Sharma. The language around "open development tools and audiences" echoes Epic's platform strategy almost word for word.
What most players miss in all the restructuring noise is that the cuts and the metaverse ambitions are not separate stories. Sharma's goal is for Xbox to entertain "more than a billion people each day." Traditional console exclusives, even successful ones like a new Gears of War, are not going to get there. A platform play built around UGC, persistent identity, and cross-game economies might, at least in theory.
Ball predicts in his book that "by the end of the current decade many if not most of us will agree that the 'Metaverse' has begun." If he is right, Xbox needs to be building infrastructure for that now. If he is wrong, the platform just shed thousands of developers and four studios in service of a vision that never arrives.
For players watching Xbox's direction, the most concrete near-term signals will come from how Microsoft positions Minecraft and its developer tools ecosystem over the next 12 to 18 months. If you're playing on Xbox hardware right now, check out our ROG Xbox Ally X settings guide for performance tips, and keep an eye on what Game Pass looks like as the reset plays out. You can also check which titles are landing on the service, including details on whether Halo: Campaign Evolved is on Xbox Game Pass at launch. For broader coverage of everything happening across the Xbox platform and beyond, our guides hub has you covered as Ball's strategy starts to take shape.
