Nintendo's former 'indie advocate' Damon Baker joins up with Xbox

Damon Baker, Nintendo’s former head of partner management, has joined up with Xbox to serve as the team’s head of portfolio. Baker shared the move on Twitter today, just weeks after announcing he had left Nintendo after over a decade with the company.

It’s a role similar in nature to his previous position at Nintendo, and the switch sees him now working to further Xbox’s efforts with external developers.

Baker describes himself as an advocate for indie games, and his previous and now current position reflect that quality. Prior to joining up with Xbox, Baker spent over 12 yeas at Nintendo and, most recently, played a major part in the curated indie game push that hit the Nintendo Switch shortly after the system’s launch in 2017.

As Baker detailed in an interview that year, that effort meant learning from the mistakes of the Wii U’s lackadaisical third-party support and ensuring that game developers were armed with the knowledge they’d need to make the best of the Switch’s hardware this time around.

Now, as Xbox's head of portfolio, Baker says he'll be a key player in evaluating all second and third-party content to further Xbox's strategies alongside ID@Xbox director Chris Charla, Xbox Games Marketing general manager Aaron Greenberg, and Xbox head Phil Spencer.