Xbox hires Portal lead designer Kim Swift as senior director of cloud gaming

Portal lead designer, Kim Swift, is joining the Xbox Game Studios Publishing team to help advance the company's core pillars, Microsoft has announced.

Swift, a game developer known for being a lead designer on the original Portal game at Valve has joined Xbox Game Studios Publishing as senior director of cloud gaming. Swift's role at Xbox is detailed to "help accelerate our innovation and collaborate with studios who are looking to join us on our journey to build cloud-native games," Peter Wyse, head of Xbox Game Studios Publishing said in a press release. For what is said to be the first time, Xbox showcased the three core pillars that it follows in development, listing community, innovation, and inclusivity. 

Swift's career also saw them working on Left 4 Dead and its sequel, shifting to EA as a design director on Star Wars: Battlefront 2 later on, followed by director of design at Google Stadia. Eurogamer also details that Swift originally impressed Valve with their Portal-based game demo, which landed them the role of lead designer.

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Wyse also explained that the Xbox Game Studios Publishing team is "focused on supporting global independent developers to build great games that will help us reach the 3 billion gamers around the world." This month we saw a wealth of titles revealed at E3 2021 with the Xbox and Bethesda E3 2021 Games Showcase a bunch of new titles and upcoming major updates to existing games. Xbox Games Showcase: Extended also gave up a more in-depth look at some of the games as well as talking with some of the developers that are a part of Xbox Game Studios.

Xbox's focus on cloud gaming has been steadily increasing, and in a recent interview with GamesRadar+, Matt Booty, head of Xbox Game Studios believes that the future of Xbox is in its ecosystem, and says, "in terms of market size, console is about 200 to 300 million players", which to Xbox is a small number when it wants to reach billions of gamer, which is why it's investing so heavily in PC and cloud gaming.

Looking for the best Xbox Cloud gaming titles to play? Make sure you check out our best Prime Day laptop deals to make sure you're cloud-ready.