Morning Save Point: Xbox’s COO Quits, Zelda Trailer, and More

Saturday morning. Modern Warfare 4 launched on Friday, October 23. Everything else from Friday was quieter but heavier. Xbox lost its first chief operating officer after three months in the job, and Battlefield 6’s staged Mass Effect crossover vanished from the menus. Nintendo put out a new Ocarina of Time trailer twelve days before the Switch 2 remake arrives.

The big one

Helen Chiang is leaving Microsoft, and the chief operating officer role the company created for the first time in its history is going with her. Xbox CEO Asha Sharma announced it in an internal memo on October 23 that The Verge saw: “Helen Chiang is leaving Microsoft today.” Sharma added that “We’ll share more on COO leadership as plans are finalized.” Her responsibilities are being split among other Xbox leaders for now, and Microsoft declined to explain why.

The role itself is three months old. In Xbox’s July 6 reset memo, Sharma wrote that the company was establishing “a Chief Operating Officer with end-to-end P&L responsibility across content, hardware, platform, and services.” Chiang, who spent nearly two decades at Xbox helping build Xbox Live and later led Mojang and the Minecraft franchise, would report directly to her. The same memo announced the largest restructure in Xbox history: roughly 3,200 roles cut through FY27, about 1,600 on day one, four studios leaving Xbox for new management, and management layers capped at five. For example, the memo said Xbox was running at margins three to ten times lower than comparable platform and publishing businesses, and it handed that problem, and the P&L across content, hardware, platform and services, to one new executive.

The part worth watching is who picks up that P&L. Xbox put one person in charge of content, hardware, platform and services at once, and three months later the job is split across other leaders with no permanent replacement named. Until someone fills it, the calls that decide what lands on the platform and what goes into Game Pass get made in pieces instead of by the office that was meant to tie them together. Our Game Pass story from October 19 and Sharma’s new-IP push from October 14 both sit on that org chart, and the chart is still moving.

Also happening

• Battlefield 6 pulled its Mass Effect cosmetics before anyone could unlock them. A Normandy ship charm, N7 tags and sci-fi weapon skins turned up in the cosmetic menus with Season Five earlier in October. None of them could be earned or bought. After EA closed BioWare, players found them gone, and Eurogamer reports that the Mass Effect items have been scrubbed from the menus, weeks before N7 Day on November 7. We covered BioWare’s closure and the 400 job cuts here.
• Call of Duty just posted the highest Steam peak we have recorded. Our Steam player data tracked by Pixel Herald has the Call of Duty hub at 158,432 players right now. It peaked at 198,308 in the last 24 hours, up 134% on the same peak a week earlier, and the highest reading since we started tracking the app on October 11.
• Nintendo posted a new Ocarina of Time trailer, and the ESRB has published its rating summary. “The Battle for Hyrule Begins” went up on Nintendo of America’s official channel on October 23. The ESRB’s entry rates the Switch 2 remake E10+ for Animated Blood and Fantasy Violence. It launches November 5, and our pre-order guide has the file size and languages.
• Steam’s Personal Calendar is live for everyone. Valve’s recommendation feature has left the Steam Labs experiments. It now sits on the front page for all users, filling the gap between the “popular” shelf and the “similar to what you play” shelf. In Valve’s own announcement the company says the algorithm draws on how long you play what you already own, and refreshes daily. It adds: “We don’t sell placement on the Steam Personal Calendar, or anywhere else on Steam.” Valve says players click on more than 2,000 different games there on an average day.
• Elden Ring has sold an estimated 36.4 million copies. Alinea Analytics puts the figure at about $2 billion, with 9.8 million owners past 100 hours. We ran the numbers this morning, including the Steam achievement data behind them.

Out today

Realize in Peace is the one release we can confirm today. It landed on Steam and itch.io this morning, free, in Japanese and English. It is a point-and-click interactive fiction about saying goodbye to your late wife a second time, after you bring her back inside a computer and then have to let her go. The team, YOWPY, is two former university classmates who first built it as their graduation project five years ago.

Otherwise it is a quiet Saturday. The next three days are the busy ones, and the ones worth blocking a weekend for:

Our Release Calendar has every dated game, and our guide to the Croc 2 remake covers what changed.

Deal of the day

Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 is 75% off on Steam at $14.99, down from $59.99, and the sale ends today, October 24, at noon Central. That is the last day at that price. If it has been sitting in your wishlist, today is the one to buy it.

One more thing

Atari is turning off the lights on the Atari VCS. In an announcement dated October 21, the company said the console’s software store closes on February 1, 2027. January 31 is the last day to add anything to your library. After that, Atari will release an OS update that moves the whole thing off its own servers for authentication and software, and every owner gets an Atari Homebrew app so they can keep adding software themselves. The 2021 VCS was a $399 Linux-based hybrid with 100 classic games preloaded, and it was never really about the software it shipped with. An official homebrew app is a decent way to keep it worth owning.

Edited by Kerwin Stewart, Editor-in-Chief · How we report