About Ozymandias
Ozymandias is the Xbox Live gamertag of Andre Vrignaud, as well as my platform to speak to gamers directly. I’ve worked at Microsoft for over four years, helping manage the overall gaming platform strategy for Xbox and Windows. This basically means my job is to look out ahead one to two years and try to project where we, our competition, and the game industry in general will be. I take that thinking, the work many other folks do internally, and coalesce it into a roadmap that we take out to our game developers and publishers. Of equal importance, I also help take feedback we hear from those partners and make sure the right teams internally have it so we can react appropriately.
I’ve been working in the game industry for almost 20 years. Started out as a tester (back in the days when you could start as a tester) at Strategic Simulations, Inc. (SSI), where I worked on a variety of AD&D games as well as one of the first MMOs to ever be released – Dark Sun Online. After SSI I joined the Total Entertainment Network (TEN) where I helped build one of the first online gaming networks. In fact, TEN is one of the major reasons I joined Microsoft as Xbox Live is, in many ways, a modern version of what we tried to do with TEN (except that now we have a much larger audience, huge broadband penetration, and Daddy Warbucks backing us up.) TEN died a horrible start-up death due to being too early and eventually became Pogo (and then was acquired by EA to be their casual games arm). After TEN I worked at Intel where I managed their PC games strategy, coincidentally was involved with some of the early Xbox/Intel negotiations, and finally had the opportunity to join the Xbox team back in 2002.
With full credit to Major Nelson, I’m going to crib a bit of his About text as it will apply to what I say and do as well.
What you can expect here:
I often see a lot of random speculation and uninformed commentary on the game industry, game platforms, and technology all over the web. While I will obviously never share anything confidential, just by nature of the fact that I’m paid to think about this stuff all the time, my hope is that I’ll be able to shed light on some of the reasons things happen in the industry and spark some interesting conversations. Frankly, I also hope to learn more about what you want to see in the future of our gaming industry so I might be able to help make it happen.
Standard Legal Disclaimer:
I run this blog on my own time and at my own cost. Anything I say on this blog is my own personal opinion, and is not read or approved by anyone before it is posted. Even though I work for Microsoft, not everything posted accurately reflects the views of my company, my management, Microsoft partners, affiliates, or even my mother. I will do my best to ensure everything I post is accurate, but all posts as provided “AS IS” with no warranties, and confers no rights.
What you will not find here:
Please note that I cannot and will not comment on rumors, unreleased details, confidential data, or anything that is covered by my Microsoft NDA. Simply put, I love my job and this industry too much to ever betray that trust. Just want to be super-clear on that as I’ll simply ignore any posts or emails seeking this sort of information.
That’s about it! I’m definitely interested in hearing your thoughts, so please feel free to comment on posts, and I’ll be sure to respond as appropriate. You're also welcome to email me at ozymandias@ozymandias.com, but please understand that I may not be able to reply to every message.
Thanks for reading, and good gaming to you!