Microsoft lost a senior executive in its game business today — something that happens fairly regularly in the twists and turns of the trade.
Shane Kim is resigning from the company today. After 19 years at Microsoft, Kim apparently left voluntarily to spend more time with his family. His responsibilities are shifting to a newly created role — chief operating officer — in Microsoft’s Interactive Entertainment Business, which is headed by Don Mattrick. Dennis Durkin, who is the chief financial officer of IEB, is taking on the chief operating officer role.
Kim played a supporting role in Microsoft’s game business for many years. He wasn’t a big game fan himself. In fact, he once acknowledged to me that he got seasick playing first-person shooter games such as Halo. He took a lot of ribbing from his team about that admission. Kim joined the game division in the early days when Microsoft’s only big properties were Flight Simulator and Golf. With his boss Ed Fries, he helped grow the division with games like Age of Empires. Then he helped the game group get ready for the launch of the Xbox game console in 2001.
Kim got his big chance after Fries, the longtime chief of Microsoft Game Studios, resigned in 2004. Kim was appointed to that job and helped the company develop its all-important line-up for the launch of the Xbox 360 in 2005. Among the titles his lieutenants had to manage was Halo 2, which ran behind schedule but which ultimately became one of Microsoft’s bestsellers. While Fries had to commission a lot of new games, Kim had to pare back, cutting a lot of unprofitable game projects such as Microsoft’s various massively multiplayer online games. Still, he had budgets in the tens of millions for dollars for some games and ran studios with more than 1,000 employees.
A lot of people disputed the wisdom of that strategy. But Kim felt the trade-off was necessary since Microsoft had to focus on its console business in the war with Sony and Nintendo. His focused investments paid off with new properties such as Gears of War. Last year, Kim became corporate vice president of strategy and business development for the game division while Phil Spencer became head of the studios. Spencer will now become a corporate vice president and keep the same job as head of the studios. I last interviewed Kim in June, at the E3 trade show, where he talked about Project Natal, the controllerless, full-body game control system for the Xbox 360.
Executive departures are fairly common at the Microsoft game business. Peter Moore left in 2008 to join Electronic Arts. Former EA executive John Schappert joined Microsoft to take the helm at Xbox Live, but he left this summer to return to the No. 2 post at Electronic Arts. Kim plans to stay through the end of the year.