Mojang, the studio behind Minecraft, has a new CEO. Xbox announced that Maria Angelidou-Smith, until now chief product officer at Reddit and previously nearly a decade at Meta, takes over the studio on October 19, 2026. Her predecessor, Kayleen Walters, isn't leaving the company. She's moving to the newly created Xbox XP division, which will manage Microsoft brands beyond games themselves.

Who is Mojang's new boss

Angelidou-Smith spent almost ten years at Meta, where she was responsible for Facebook Groups (a feature used by 1.8 billion people a month), as well as events, creators, search and monetization. She later worked at Personio, an HR software company, before finally becoming chief product officer at Reddit. That's the role she's leaving for Mojang.

The decision was announced by Xbox head Asha Sharma in an internal memo dated October 8, 2026, first reported by The Hollywood Reporter. Sharma explained the reasoning plainly:

Mojang already has an exceptional development team that deeply understands Minecraft and its players. We needed someone who has built products for communities at enormous scale, who is deeply technical and understands how creators, product, technology and monetization come together
He added that Angelidou-Smith brings a rare combination of all those experiences.

Walters moves to the new XP division

Kayleen Walters became head of Mojang in February 2025. Before that she spent 13 years at Lucasfilm, where she helped lead the Star Wars brand across movies, products and partnerships. At Mojang, according to Sharma, she helped grow Minecraft's consumer products business into a multibillion-dollar operation with more than 250 licensees, while copies of the game sold rose from 350 million to 425 million over that time. Walters was also an executive producer on the first Minecraft movie and is working on its sequel.

Now Walters is being promoted to president of the newly created Xbox XP division, short for "Experience Points". The division covers four areas: Xbox Pictures (movies and series), Xbox Products (licensing and merchandise), Xbox Partnerships (sponsors and partner brands) and Xbox Places (events, theme parks and real-world experiences). Xbox chief strategy officer Matthew Ball described the new structure as a consolidation of capabilities that had existed in different teams for years, stressing Xbox's ambition to become the number one entertainment company in the world.

What this means for Minecraft players

For the community playing Minecraft Java Edition and Bedrock Edition, a change in Mojang's top seat doesn't by itself mean any immediate changes to the game. Technical development is still handled by the studio's dev team, and the coming weeks will bring more snapshots of the 26.4 update, including the recently tested packed ice bricks. Angelidou-Smith is set to report directly to Xbox leadership, just like Walters in her new role.

Still, the fact that Mojang's new boss has a background in monetization and building communities around digital products, rather than in making games, may hint at where the studio's strategy is headed. Some commentators abroad point out that Xbox announced no specific changes to Minecraft monetization along with this decision, which doesn't fully reassure players worried about the future of free updates in upcoming versions of the game.

Minecraft as the foundation of a bigger Xbox strategy

The creation of the XP division shows how much Minecraft matters to Microsoft's overall strategy beyond game sales alone. In the memo, Sharma described Minecraft as one of the largest communities in entertainment, made up of hundreds of millions of people who play, build, create, learn, watch, mod and run their own servers. That's the rationale for a separate structure handling movies, theme parks and licensing, while Mojang itself focuses on developing the game and its relationship with the creator community, including mod authors and Minecraft server operators.

It's worth noting this is already the second change at the top of Mojang in little over a year, counting from Walters taking the post in February 2025. Such turnover at the studio behind one of the most popular games in history shows that Microsoft is still experimenting with how to manage the brand, trying to combine developing the game with the growing business around it, from movies to the Minecraft World hotel and theme park planned for 2027 in Chessington near London.

Sources