Xbox Game Studios head Alan Hartman is retiring at the end of next month, and Rare head Craig Duncan is apparently set to take his place.
That’s according to a GamesIndustry.biz article, which cites an internal email sent to Xbox staff by studio boss Matt Booty. In that email, Booty celebrates Hartman’s “innovation, dedication, and…unwavering passion for gaming”.
As he points out, Hartman’s career with Microsoft began as a contractor in 1988, and he would go on to work on franchises like Age of Empires and Freelancer, as well as being included in the credits of games like Halo and Sea of Thieves.
Hartman was also involved in the founding of Forza developer Turn 10, which was established back in 2001 to steward the racing franchise.
He would go on to become Turn 10’s studio manager in 2005, a position in which he served all the way up until 2023, when he was made the head of Xbox Game Studios (rebranded from Microsoft Studios back in 2019) after former position holder Matt Booty was promoted.
All told, this means Hartman will have served as Xbox Game Studios head for just over a year at the point of his retirement, which isn’t a bad innings.
Hartman’s replacement, Craig Duncan, is the current studio head of Microsoft subsidiary Rare, a position he’s held since 2011. His appointment makes a lot of sense given that Rare is a Microsoft studio, as well as the continuing success of Rare’s live-service game Sea of Thieves.
Whether Duncan’s appointment will result in any kind of concrete change in terms of Xbox Game Studios’ strategy remains to be seen, but the label has a number of games on the horizon, including the upcoming Fable reboot and Obsidian’s first-person RPG Avowed.
Duncan also inherits a number of subsidiary studios under the Xbox label, including Psychonauts developer Double Fine, Forza and Fable studio Playground Games, and Hartman’s former stomping ground Turn 10.
