Xbox has hired social media product veteran Maria Angelidou-Smith to run Mojang and Minecraft. In a memo to staff on October 8, Xbox CEO Asha Sharma announced that Angelidou-Smith, most recently chief product officer at Reddit, will join as CEO of Mojang and Minecraft. She starts on October 19 and will report directly to Sharma.
Angelidou-Smith replaces Kayleen Walters, who moves to lead XP, the new Xbox division covering film, TV, merchandise, and live experiences. Walters had run Mojang since February 2025, a period in which Xbox says Minecraft grew from 350 million copies sold to more than 425 million.
Angelidou-Smith's background is in community products rather than game development. 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 sought someone who has "built products for communities at enormous scale" and understands how creators, technology, and monetization come together.
The hire fits Xbox's recent messaging about Minecraft. When Sharma announced 3,200 layoffs in July, she had Mojang and King report directly to her, describing both as studios that have become platforms. Minecraft still draws more than 300,000 first-time players on an average day, and its first new dimension in over 14 years, The Sift, is due in 2027. Xbox has not announced any change to how Minecraft makes money, though the memo's mention of monetization may unsettle some players.
Source: TechPowerUp News · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing