Xbox Sport Studios head Alan Hartman is retiring on the finish of subsequent month, and Uncommon head Craig Duncan is outwardly set to take his place.
That is in keeping with a GamesIndustry.biz article, which cites an inside electronic mail despatched to Xbox workers by studio boss Matt Booty. In that electronic mail, Booty celebrates Hartman’s “innovation, dedication, and…unwavering ardour for gaming”.
As he factors out, Hartman’s profession with Microsoft started as a contractor in 1988, and he would go on to work on franchises like Age of Empires and Freelancer, in addition to being included within the credit of video games like Halo and Sea of Thieves.
Hartman was additionally concerned within the founding of Forza developer Flip 10, which was established again in 2001 to steward the racing franchise.
He would go on to turn into Flip 10’s studio supervisor in 2005, a place by which he served all the best way up till 2023, when he was made the pinnacle of Xbox Sport Studios (rebranded from Microsoft Studios again in 2019) after former place holder Matt Booty was promoted.
All informed, this implies Hartman could have served as Xbox Sport Studios head for simply over a 12 months on the level of his retirement, which is not a nasty innings.
Hartman’s substitute, Craig Duncan, is the present studio head of Microsoft subsidiary Uncommon, a place he is held since 2011. His appointment makes a whole lot of sense provided that Uncommon is a Microsoft studio, in addition to the persevering with success of Uncommon’s live-service sport Sea of Thieves.
Whether or not Duncan’s appointment will lead to any type of concrete change by way of Xbox Sport Studios’ technique stays to be seen, however the label has quite a lot of video games on the horizon, together with the upcoming Fable reboot and Obsidian’s first-person RPG Avowed.
Duncan additionally inherits quite a lot of subsidiary studios underneath the Xbox label, together with Psychonauts developer Double Positive, Forza and Fable studio Playground Video games, and Hartman’s former stomping floor Flip 10.