Xbox has hired a social media product veteran to run Mojang. In a memo to staff on October 8, Xbox CEO Asha Sharma said Maria Angelidou-Smith, most recently chief product officer at Reddit, will join as CEO of Mojang and Minecraft. She starts on October 19 and reports directly to Sharma. Angelidou-Smith replaces Kayleen Walters, who moves over to lead XP, the new Xbox division for film, TV, merchandise, and live experiences. Walters had run Mojang since February 2025, and Xbox says Minecraft went from 350 million copies sold to more than 425 million in that time.
Angelidou-Smith's background is in community products, with no game studio role mentioned. According to the memo, she spent nearly a decade at Meta, where she led Facebook Groups along with Events, Creators, Search, Profile, and Monetization. She later led product and technology at HR software company Personio and joined Reddit in November 2025. Sharma wrote that Mojang already has an exceptional game development team, so Xbox went looking for someone who has "built products for communities at enormous scale" and understands how creators, technology, and monetization come together. Her first order of business, apparently, is to learn from the teams and the community.[](https://www.techpowerup.com/img/mBipcERPUuKDl6EX.jpg) [](https://www.techpowerup.com/img/UpfAbUlD6CCYCthX.jpg)Read full story
Source: TechPowerUp News · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing