Xbox Developer Boyd Multerer Leaves After 18 Years

Boyd Multerer, a key figure in the Xbox division, has left the company after 18 years.

Goodbye Microsoft. It was a good run. Xbox was Great! Time to do something new.

— Boyd Multerer (@BoydMulterer) December 29, 2014

Multerer received this in-depth profile from Microsoft last year, but to sum, he was most responsible for these:

·         Founding (the first employee) and laying the foundations of the Xbox Live service

·         Developing XNA, the programming language that made it possible to easily program games for Microsoft platforms Windows and Xbox

·         Helping develop the Xbox One, particularly designing it to be able to run three operating systems simultaneously

Multerer’s departure caps off a series of exits and reassignments of major Xbox One staff members within the last year. While the console itself has rallied in sales, these departures seem attributable to the changing needs of the company.

Among the people who left or were moved were:

• ·         Marc Whitten, previously Xbox Vice President
• ·         Ben Smith, Xbox TV’s head of programming
• ·         Kareem Choudhry, who was reassigned from being Kinect development head to Xbox development head

Only Jeff Henshaw has remained in his role as the team’s program manager. Of course, all these departures also fall under the shadow of no less than the Xbox chief Don Mattrick leaving the company, a few months into Xbox One’s launch, to take over as CEO of Zynga.

Perhaps this change is just Microsoft needs, going into 2015, as they unveil Windows 10 – and along with it, the future of Windows gaming.