

Zynga Confirms Xbox Head Don Mattrick As New CEO - triketora
http://allthingsd.com/20130701/in-major-hire-zynga-confirms-xbox-head-mattrick-as-new-ceo-replacing-founder/?mod=tweet

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JL2010
One thing that has gotten lost in the noise of Xbox One's marketing mishap and
the targeting of Mattrick is perhaps his history as a true entrepreneur.

While it hasn't shown so lately, Don does come from a grassroots background in
gaming as a former 17 year old co-founder and programmer of Distinctive
Software in 1982. His company was acquired by EA which likely put him on the
path to executive level success. A kind of exit that some founders dream
about.

It's easy to make a judgement and discredit or target him but I do believe he
has genuine passion for gaming and hopefully he can infuse some of that in a
place like Zynga.

~~~
kabdib
Passion for gaming is great. He has a /lot/ of that.

However: Not a very good technical leader, extremely isolated from the troops
(even the principal ones who are designing the new products) which badly
affected direction and morale, and very bad at messaging (which I suspect is
the /real/ reason he's going).

Of course, what replaces him could be worse.

~~~
pandaman
> and very bad at messaging (which I suspect is the /real/ reason he's going).

Was not he the guy who pushed for Kinect? I am not aware much about MS's
internal politics but the timeline seems to match.

If so, then the real reason, in my humble opinion, is this: Microsoft is now
about to fight for the 8th generation with an underpowered yet $100 more
expensive console.

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potatolicious
With what little info we have, this seems actually like a good move. Part of
Zynga's core problem is that their games are frequently more psycological
tweakery than legitimately rewarding or fun.

Importing someone who comes from "real" gaming seems like a good move in this
regard. Hopefully this means Zynga intends to move towards "fun games with
microtransactions" and away from "pretty one-armed bandits with
microtransactions".

~~~
beaumartinez
Xbox One, _real_ gaming? A machine that was going to lock all your gaming
purchases down, so you couldn't even share your physical discs with friends? A
company that charged $10,000 for patches—even trivial ones fixing serious,
game-breaking bugs?

Microsoft's gaming division has become the definition a "pretty one-armed
bandit with microtransactions", and no doubt thanks to Mattrick.

~~~
drivebyacct2
>so you couldn't even share your physical discs with friends?

Yeah, what assholes, instead they made it so you don't have to screw around
with physical media and can instead share your games with 10 of your friends
around the world without having to deal with a disc.

Also, they just removed that update fee.

Besides, bitching about the Xbox One's distribution model is kinda overdone at
this point.

~~~
Goronmon
_Yeah, what assholes, instead they made it so you don 't have to screw around
with physical media and can instead share your games with 10 of your friends
around the world without having to deal with a disc._

Well, to be fair, there was nothing really concrete about their plans. And now
that they've changed their minds they can talk big about how awesome it would
have been. But I seriously doubt the end result would have amazing as everyone
claimed it would have been.

~~~
drivebyacct2
Those details (that I mentioned) were fully disclosed before they changed
their policies, obviously.

It's not Microsoft's fault that reddit blew up in a circle-jerk of
misinformation. Granted, they could have marketed it better and made that
story clearer.

~~~
pharrington
_fully disclosed_

 _reddit circle-jerk of misinformation_

I'll post this again, from an interview taken on June 10th.

 _[Phil] Spencer: But we 're also trying to launch and we understand feature
sets. We've got partners and publishers [we] want to talk to about how lending
is going to work. We don't dictate pricing to our partners on our platform. We
want to give them capabilities to support content and business models that
they want to support with their content. It sounds like Sony is trying to do
the same thing. How do we support what our partners want to do? We want to
have the conversations with them and land on a plan.

We understand lending and the benefits of lending, so, funny videos aside, we
get it. We want to make sure we land on the right solution that fits a digital
ecosystem moving forward.

If you think about lending in digital ecosystems, it's not something a lot of
other people have supported. We're going to commit... gifting, we said we're
going to support that, secondary market we're going to support that even
though the license is digital and it's not as trivial as just handing a disc
to someone else. Lending, we want to do it, we want to work with our partners
to make it possible.

Kotaku: You understand, obviously, that because these things exist on discs,
it's why it seems so odd that—you're not launching until November—since I
would think I can lend you this notebook and discs, surely I could do the
same, but you guys are saying that you won't have the lending solution.

Spencer: We don't have a lending solution today.

Kotaku: You might have one?

Spencer: We don't have a path... I don't want to make a commitment to somebody
without a plan of record on how that lands. I could over-promise, under-
deliver on the features. I don't want to do that. I want to make sure. I
understand how gifting is going to work. I understand how the secondary market
is going to work._

From Phil Spencer's own mouth, sharing was never an actual feature of the XBox
One.

[http://kotaku.com/the-xbox-one-believers-513819282](http://kotaku.com/the-
xbox-one-believers-513819282)

~~~
drivebyacct2
That _whole article_ that you link to is about the Share with 10 Family
Members feature, leading me to conclude that "lending" in that sentence is
explicitly physical lending and... you know... from the context directly
around it, reselling used games.

>Xbox One will enable new forms of access for families. Up to ten members of
your family can log in and play from your shared games library on any Xbox
One.

That's a concrete statement from MS and one they made numerous times. And they
more or less say "yes, we don't care who the 10 people actually are".

I mean, come on, did we both read the same block of text? It is extremely
explicit at the end about being physical lending.

~~~
pharrington
Saying "we don't care who the 10 people are" is a world of difference from
"there are _no restrictions_ on the 10 people you can share with." It is not
implementation details that are defined in a contract. It is not information.

And again, Spencer was talking about "lending in a digital ecosystem." The
thing Microsoft did not have concrete plans for. Yes, he mentioned they have a
plan for _gifting_ games, they have a plan for _reselling_ games, but he
contrasted this with the difficulty of, and their lack of plan for _lending_
games.

Yeah I guess it's moot now, but at this point I _always_ interpret a lack of
specifics when talking about a product as marketing speak. We have fact
sheets, we have plenty of discreet, unambiguous information of other features;
when somebody goes out of the way to hype up a feature of a product while
painstakingly avoiding concrete, verifiable information about said feature,
and verifiable information about said feature doesn't appear in the previously
mentioned fact sheets, I assume the feature doesn't actually exist yet.
Especially when an executive goes on to literally say the feature doesn't
exist.

~~~
drivebyacct2
I took the references to the "notebook and disks" in the critical section of
that interview to be implication of physical disc trading/lending but I
understand what you're saying.

Still. I mean, this is what they published to the world as their official
feature list:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:s-KgYAn...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:s-KgYAnQDlEJ:news.xbox.com/2013/06/license+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)
before they published the update in response to the butthurt backlash.

"Give your family access to your entire games library anytime, anywhere: Xbox
One will enable new forms of access for families. Up to ten members of your
family can log in and play from your shared games library on any Xbox One.
Just like today, a family member can play your copy of Forza Motorsport at a
friend’s house. Only now, they will see not just Forza, but all of your shared
games. You can always play your games, and any one of your family members can
be playing from your shared library at a given time."

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sriramk
Great hire for Zynga. Don is hugely respected at Microsoft and was actually
tipeed to be a potential Ballmer successor. Big loss for Microsoft.

~~~
mtgx
Interesting. It seems a lot of "potential Ballmer successors" have been let go
from Microsoft in the past few years, from Ray Ozzie to Sinofsky, and now this
one, too.

I wonder what this means for Zynga - more DRM?

~~~
sriramk
I don't this in the same vein. I think Don was well-liked all around.

~~~
runevault
Did that hold up after the One debacle that lead to a total about face? And he
was at least part of it, with comments like "if you can't take advantage of
the xbox one, we have a solution for you. The xbox 360" (not exact wording but
you get the point).

I could very much imagine the whole mess costing him a lot within MS and
leading to him looking to go somewhere else and start over.

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jcdavis
Looks like Pincus is staying around though, which seems odd. If the board is
unhappy with his performance (and rightfully so), wouldn't starting fresh be a
better move?

~~~
sdoowpilihp
Did you read the part where it stated Mark Pincus has a 61% voting control in
Zynga?

