Xbox just admitted the quiet part out loud: it wants to be Sony and Nintendo when it grows up, and it's only getting around to saying so now. Microsoft announced a new division called XP, built from four branches, Xbox Pictures, Xbox Products, Xbox Partnerships, and Xbox Places, all aimed at turning its games into movies, merchandise, and live experiences. Which is to say, the exact playbook PlayStation has been running since before The Last of Us ever hit a television screen.

Give Xbox this much, the hire is a real one. Kayleen Walters, the former Mojang president, takes the reins, and chief strategy officer Matthew Ball laid out why in a statement reported by GameSpot: under her watch, Minecraft went from 350 million units sold to more than 425 million, its merchandising cracked the global top 20, and A Minecraft Movie posted the biggest opening weekend a video game adaptation has ever had. That's not spin, that's a scoreboard of its own, and I'll hand it over without an argument.

So what's the next Xbox franchise getting shipped off to a theme park? Minecraft, again, according to Xbox CTO Scott Van Vliet, who folded theme parks into Xbox Places, with Ball calling the upcoming UK park, first reported by Eurogamer, just the first of many. Mojang also gets a new CEO in Maria Angelidou-Smith, arriving from Meta and Reddit, as the Destin channel laid out in its own breakdown of the announcement.

Here's the part Xbox won't say in a blog post: Sony and Nintendo didn't need a four-branch org chart to put their characters on a theme park ride or a movie poster, they just did it. Xbox built the department first and is hoping the hits follow. I've seen that bet before, and it only pays off if somebody actually makes the movie good.