One of the lead developers behind Xbox’s backward compatibility initiative, a 37-year veteran at Microsoft, has been laid off.
Kevin LaChapelle, who, until this week, served as the vice president of Xbox Platform, took to LinkedIn to confirm he’s been laid off as part of Microsoft’s widespread restructuring.
“I will add my name to the list of people who were laid off today at Xbox,” LaChapelle wrote.
“This ends my 37 years at Microsoft. I have worked in many different parts of the company, and I will say my fondest memories are of leading the team of very talented engineers who built the Xbox Backward Compatibility program.
“Sitting in the auditorium when Phil announced the program at E3 2015 was incredible. The audience’s reaction was unbelievable. I followed that with leading the team who created our Cloud Gaming product. I am a firm believer that all entertainment will eventually become streamed to you wherever you are. I look forward to watching how Xbox evolves going forward and I wish the team nothing but success.”
Xbox’s Cloud Gaming initiative allows players to stream games to consoles, as well as non-Xbox devices. The service received a large internal and public push from Microsoft in recent years, but it hasn’t appeared to resonate with a core audience.
Conversely, Xbox’s approach to backwards compatibility has been the envy of players on other consoles due to Microsoft’s work to allow players to enter a large number of original Xbox and Xbox 360 discs into their current machines and play them natively.
LaChapelle is the latest high-profile name to announce that they’ve been released from the company.
Earlier this week, it was reported that 60-70 developers at Obsidian had been laid off, and that a large portion of Id Software’s coders had also gone.
