Microsoft veteran Andre Vrignaud has announced that he is to leave his position as director of game platform strategy at the Xbox maker to take on a new role at Amazon.
Vrignaud has worked at Microsoft since 2002, helping manage the overall gaming platform strategy for Xbox, Xbox Live and Windows.
“I make this announcement with mixed emotions as I’m excited about where Microsoft is going in the next few years as they look to reinvent digital entertainment… but I’m also obviously very intrigued about what Amazon is looking to do,” Vrignaud said on his blog. “Can’t really talk about details at this point, but it’ll become pretty evident soon enough… and you all know where my passions lie.”
Vrignaud’s hint that his new role will be gaming related may signal that the online retail giant is looking to grow its share in the marketplace. Lazard Capital Markets analyst Colin Sebastian said in March that Amazon job advertisements implied the firm is looking to expand its digital distribution business by pursuing new opportunities “as an aggregator of online games, similar to Steam, BigPoint and others".
Amazon opened its casual games store in 2008, saying it was "a good way to enter the market", adding: "We'll learn about the space, and in the future you can expect we will expand our selection. Whether or not we go into core PC games is to be determined."
“It’s been an amazing eight years here at Microsoft,” Vrignaud added. “I originally joined to help build and evangelize Xbox Live to a skeptical game industry. When I started, the team consisted of maybe 30 people in a hallway in the now-defunct Millennium campus… Not many people remember now, but there was a time when even the idea of Xbox Live was extremely controversial. We got… robust, shall we say, feedback on a variety of subjects. I remember folks insisting that voice would never be desired from the console audience, or that this whole crazy digital content download Marketplace thing would never take off. And of course, quite a few folks struggled to believe that Xbox Live would be a service that people would be willing to pay for. 25 million+ members later I think that debate has finally been put to rest.”