Report: Don Mattrick Leaving Microsoft for...Zynga? [UPDATE: It's Official]

This makes perfect sense, on all sides. There should be an award at the end of the year for "The Most Predictable News Story No One Predicted".

Yes, I'm sure the man who is practically solely the face of one of Microsoft's largest crash and burns and forced the company into a massive "damage control" situation which led to a complete reversal on decisions that had surely cost the company a huge sum of money designing and implementing infrastructure for is just "by chance" shopping for another job.

Good riddance and let's be honest, is this *really* a shock? At least the sinking ship known as Zynga is a match for his ideas.

Hell even the 1st xbox is better than the xbox one and makes fricking bill gates look cool standing next to it when J allard was in charge of the 1st xbox and xbox 360

Wait, this is his escape plan?

That's like running from a pack of wild dogs straight into a wood chipper. Is this guy trying to destroy himself?

What the fuck is happening

I don't know anything about video games anymore. Next news will be Nintendo creating actual genetic clones of pokemon and selling them for collection and battles with the 3DS as a pokedex.

Woah, I was expecting that he'd at least make it to the Xbox launch.

Think it's safe to say that Mattrick has officially had the worst E3 anyone has ever had ever.

@thegorilla: Good call.

Sony stole their NOC list, just, mail him his clothes...

I bet he'd fit in there just fine. Doesn't look good for Microsoft's end though.

Good God.

hello darkness, my old friend

College football coaches do it all the time. They have shady recruiting practices and then they do really well and then they figure out they're caught and they start fishing for NFL jobs. Look at Pete Carroll and Chip Kelly.

CEO at Zynga is a step up from what he is doing. I am sure there will be an extra zero or two on his paychecks now.

@sanj said:

Hahahaha

Uhm. Zynga E3 Hype Train?. .

"leaving"

is this a joke!?!?!?!?

BREAKING NEWS: Farmville 2 just been announced as next month's XB Live Gold Free Game.

Quality over quantity won't save Zynga's mismanagement, just look at what happen to THQ.

Zynga has absolutely no competitive advantage. They either copy or buy out the competition. That plan rarely ever works out for companies. Hell, they bought a company that just made a pictionary game (OMGPOP) for 200 million dollars. There's no way to save a company that doesn't even do the work themselves to copy another idea. THQ at least had some franchises that nobody else had. The same cannot be said for Zynga.

Don't let the door hit ya'! ... or do.

Not even a story from my perspective.

I think people should be fair to Don Mattrick. He made a bet, he was playing for high stakes, and he lost because the other players (Sony, Publishers/Developers, and gamers) didn't fall for the him raising the stakes for another round.

I'm not sure this is true, but my guess is "much" not all but much of what Xbox One was going to be was Don's play. There were probably things he had to do like use Win 8 and Surface, but much of the business was up to him. He made the choices, it blew up in his face, so he was going to have to take the blame. Yet maybe it was no fun taking all of the blame when not all of it was his. I can only imagine what getting yelled at by Steve Balmer would be like, but I bet I would be looking to move on as well.

I don't like the choices Don Mattrick made, but I don't think he meant it to be/seem bad. He wanted to fix the used game system to spread the profit, he wanted to apply all digital rules to digital and physical games, and he to provide cloud storage for games so gamers could use their games from anywhere yet not be able to pirate them easily. I'm don't like any of that, it never would have seemed fair to me, but I can see where it seemed reasonable to MS executives.

As for who takes over...Phil Harrison? Phil would probably make publishers happy, he has clout with gamers, and he has the added benefit of giving Sony a tweak to the nose. On the other handPhil has run everything else into the ground since 2008. I think Microsoft if they went with Phil, they would be putting someone who hasn't been at their best in a while.

RIP Zynga

This is getting more and more insane as time goes on.

I am kind of surprised it took Microsoft so long. The debacle his comments caused during E3, plus the cost of investing millions of dollars in architecture and R+D, just to drop them less than a week later, should be enough for the shareholders to want his head on a plate.

I have seen people being fired for much less than that.

@sanj said:

That is the best way to describe this situation that I have ever seen.

See ya, toolbox. Good riddance.

If you think about how far microsoft's entertainment division has come since he took over, I'd say he actually did his job extremely well, and since he can leave these last few months of mistakes behind and start again somewhere else, wherever he ends up will probably really benefit from having him.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ReassignedToAntarctica

Is this even happening? The fuck is going on!

I'm more interested in the person who takes his position.

Mattrick did a good job for most of his time at MS. This news makes the last few months of weirdness with XBOX announcements make a little more sense, assuming he's been in talks to leave the company throughout the reveal - E3 time frame.

I can't think of anything clever to say so i hope a simple "lol" will suffice.

Two weeks after the Xbox One u-turn this happens. I cannot help but feel there must be a connection.

Awwww shit!

Err... Zynga? Really? Good luck with that one I guess, lol...

Hopefully MS hires/promotes someone who hasn't been media trained into a shell of a human being

@sanj said:

This is the absolutely perfect way to illustrate what Mattrick is doing.

Also, based on the picture in this article I feel that Paul Scheer could play a convincing Mattrick (with a suitable hairpiece, of course).

"Happy 4th of July!" - Microsoft

@huss: Oh, man. The only reason I've found to want a Wii-U. I wonder what sketches Giant Bomb has now.

For those of you who want to play games offline, we have an alternative for you: It's called checkers.

SDF never disappoints.

@paisan13: He's a spokesman as well as the head of the Interactive Entertainment Division, so he had oversight on all the policies that were so ill received these past few months.

this has to be a joke... No wonder why xbox started sucking after J allard left and Don mattrick went after the kinect soccer mom crap.

http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2011/technology/1108/gallery.smartest_people_tech.fortune/6.html

Remember to People that don't play games this guy is a fucking genius on the level of beethoven for video games consoles.

He has dead, soulless eyes.

I don't know much about his accomplishments, but his contact with the press in recent months hasn't left me with a glowing opinion of his abilities.