Some franchises will not report to the new leading executive

Mar 9, 2015 22:02 GMT  ·  By

The Microsoft division in charge of the company's gaming business is announcing that Kudo Tsunoda, who has been leading the development process for the HoloLens augmented reality device in the past few years, will get an expanded role and will now be in charge of other video game development projects as well.

As part of a new conversation with Larry Hryb, aka Major Nelson, the developer reveals that he is now in charge of both the vision and the actual development for Microsoft Studios titles in the United States, Europe and elsewhere in the world.

Halo, Gears of War, Forza and Minecraft will remain independent as franchises and will continue to report their progress directly to Xbox leader Phil Spencer.

The announcement states, "Kudo has been driving the creative direction and experience development for Microsoft HoloLens, and will bring a fresh, innovative and gamer-centric approach to development for our expanding and diverse game portfolio across Xbox and Windows 10 devices including HoloLens."

It seems that Microsoft is aiming to make sure that as many future games as possible will support both the HoloLens and Kinect, which might be a sign that hardware will shape gameplay more than it has done until now.

Phil Harrison might be on his way out of Microsoft

The fact that Kudo Tsunoda is getting a promotion, although it is not presented as such, might be a sign that rumors about Phil Harrison are true and he is really getting ready to leave the company because he is not satisfied with its current direction.

Microsoft has not commented on the rumors that have appeared during the past week, but an official announcement might arrive at any time.

Tsunoda will have to deal with some big problems in the coming months, as the company is looking for new ways to close the sales gap that the PlayStation 4 from Sony has managed to open up since the two devices were launched in November 2013.

The Xbox One has already received a price cut in North America and some big bundles have been offered, but it seems they did not have the expected impact.

The HoloLens device might be important in the near future, but it currently does not have a launch date and Sony claims that the Project Morpheus VR solution for the PS4 will be introduced in the first few months of next year.