Welcome to our new and improved regular article where we round-up the week’s big movers and shakers across the mobile games industry.
The focus of this regular article will be to compile all of the big job appointments, departures and studio moves in one easy to read place, alongside some standouts from our own jobs board and some useful articles for those job seeking at this time.
You can also catch up with all of the job news from our previous column right here.
Movers and Shakers
Small Giant Games names Jose Saarniniemi as its new CEO
Finnish studio Small Giant Games has named Jose Saarniniemi as its new CEO.
Saarniniemi will take over from current CEO Timo Soininen, with the company co-founder moving into the role of chairman of the board.
Big Run Studios welcomes Daren Chencinski as its new SVP of games
Mobile games developer and publisher Big Run Studios has appointed Daren Chencinski as its new senior vice president of games.
Before this, Chencinski held leadership roles at Glu Mobile and NCSoft, while also possessing experience in design, creative, strategy, production and operations.
Bossa Studios makes round of redundancies
London-based games developer Bossa Studios is cutting some staff due to internal issues.
13 positions were initially on the chopping block, but this now stands at 10 jobs. In total, the firm employs 85 people.
Studio news
Mediatonic opens new studio in Leamington Spa
Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout developer Mediatonic has opened a new studio in Leamington Spa.
Mediatonic Leamington Spa will be headed by company vice president of art Phil Warner.
TinyBuild acquires majority stake in Secret Neighbor dev Hologryph for $3 million
Seattle-based publisher TinyBuild has invested $3 million in Secret Neighbor developer Hologryph.
As per the agreement, TinyBuild will acquire a majority stake in the studio. Furthermore, the new funds will go towards an unnamed project for next-generation consoles.
Keywords acquire marketing services provider Gnet
Tech and creative services provider Keywords Studios has entered an agreement to acquire Gnet.
The Los Angeles-based firm is focused on marketing services for the games and entertainment industries.
Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince might acquire a majority stake in SNK
The Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia is set to become the majority stakeholder of Japanese games developer SNK.
According to a report, an agreement between EGDC and SNK has been made to sell 33 per cent of the games firm’s outstanding stock.
Kahoot acquires language learning dev Drops
Norwegian games learning platform Kahoot has acquired mobile games developer Drops.
Currently, the platform has 25 million users with 42 languages available.
Jobs board
Full Stack Engineer (Embark Studios) – Stockholm, Sweden
Senior Multiplayer Game Designer (Square Enix) – London, UK
QA Engineer (AppLovin) – Herzliya, Israel
Head on over to our Jobs Board for the full list of roles now on offer.
If you have any jobs news you would like to share, please feel free to drop a mail to matthew.forde@steeelmedianetwork.com.
