Minecraft's Matt Booty now overseeing Microsoft games

Minecraft has been a huge franchise all over the world, one that's been embraced heavily by Microsoft in particular, and now boss of Minecraft Matt Booty has been promoted to the corporate vice president of Microsoft Studios, as reported by GamesBeat, meaning he'll be working closely with Phil Spencer in the future.

In this role Booty will be overseeing the development and publishing of games after Spencer was promoted to executive vice president overseeing all elements of games, hardware, and more. As for the Minecraft group, this will now be led by Helen Chiang, previous operations chief, while Booty moves on to manage big franchises like Halo and Gears of War, on top of Minecraft as well.

"I wanted to make sure we had the right organization in place to deliver on our content goals. With that, I made the decision that I wanted to anoint a leader of our Microsoft Studios organisation, which if you've tracked it, I've had the leaders of our individual franchises reporting to me for the last three and a half years," Spencer told GamesBeat. "That's been great in driving our all-up strategy and getting us to the point where [Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella] was willing and eager to make the investment in gaming that he's made, but it's also become very clear to me that we're going to invest more in content, which we are doing, and that a unified studios leadership organisation was going to be critical to our long-term success. I've asked Matt Booty to step up into the role of leading Microsoft Studios."

"It goes without saying, but this is an incredible privilege and honor, to step into this role," Booty added. "I really look at it first and foremost as an opportunity to serve and provide a leadership layer to the studio heads, so they can focus even more on making great games. I've worked as a peer with Bonnie and Shannon and Rod and Craig, and obviously very closely with Helen as the No. 2 person on the Minecraft franchise in Redmond. It's a group I have a huge amount of respect for. It's a world-class group of leaders and a world-class collection of studios. It's a privilege to get in and help provide a layer of unification and collaboration across the studios, as we go forward helping drive the initiatives Phil talked about, getting behind the company's vision for gaming."

Is this a good choice by Microsoft?