Xbox Studios

“Gaming is fundamentally about bringing joy to people.” - Phil Spencer

Xbox Studios

I’ve worked in Xbox Studios in Redmond, WA, where I helped ship the Xbox One console and celebrated with the team at the launch party in Studio B on November 22, 2013.

This is some of the most demanding software development work that exists - where every millisecond matters and there’s no room for error, because it would spoil the fun.

Duane at the Xbox One launch party in Studio B, November 22, 2013
Xbox One launch party, Studio B, November 22, 2013

What I Did

I worked on backend systems, not games. The distinction matters: I didn’t ship any individual game titles. I shipped platform infrastructure that hundreds of games depend on - including systems leveraged by Halo.

When you build at the platform level, your work touches everything built on top of it. A bug in my code doesn’t break one game - it breaks hundreds. That’s a different kind of pressure and a different kind of responsibility.

What This Work Teaches You

  • Performance-Critical Development: Games must hit 60fps or suffer. Every line of code is scrutinized for performance. This discipline carries into everything else I build.

  • Platform Thinking: When you build infrastructure that other developers depend on, you learn to think about APIs, contracts, backwards compatibility, and the downstream consequences of every decision.

  • Cross-Functional Collaboration: Working with game developers, artists, designers, audio engineers, producers, and QA teams. Game platform development is inherently cross-functional in ways that translate directly to leading diverse engineering teams.

  • Shipping Under Pressure: Games have hard ship dates. The holiday window doesn’t move. Console launches don’t slip. Learning to scope, cut, and ship is a skill that transfers to every deadline-driven project.

GameDev.com

I own GameDev.com and use it for consulting and projects.

The skills from platform-level game development transfer directly to enterprise software: performance optimization, distributed systems, operating at scale, and shipping under pressure. When someone asks if I can handle complex technical challenges with real deadlines, I point to the fact that I helped ship a console and built backend systems used by millions of players.