There’s a lot of shuffling going on over at Zynga, the publishers of such popular mobile efforts as Farmville 2: Country Escape and the recently launched Looney Tunes Dash.
Both senior vice president of games Tim LeTourneau and Steve Parkis have departed the company, after working on a number of Zynga’s Ville games over the past few years. This follows other recent departures from the company, including Social Slots chief Maytal Olsha, who left last month.
This is part of the changing landscape of the company, particularly with Alex Garden being recruited as president and seeking out certain roles to fill within it, such as visuals, narrative, community and game making.
With that, the company has shuffled around some old faces and hired a few new ones to keep management flowing. Jamie Davies, who served as a key leader on Farmville and Country Escape, has now expanded her role as the new vice president of games.
Meanwhile, Tony Leech, who directed and helped produce a number of movies over the last decade (including the animated Hoodwinked films), has been hired as creative director.
Jim Pearson has also jumped on board as a new art director for the Ville franchise, bringing his experience as an art director and production designer for Toy Story 2, as well as a sketch artist on Finding Nemo. His resume also includes Ironworks/Gazillion, Playdom, Kabam and Disney Interactive.
Two of the new hires come from entertainment start-up company Red Robot Labs, and Zynga has brought in the company’s co-founder, Pete Hawley, as general manager and vice president of creative, as well as senior director of network content John Davison.
The last two hires make it a well-rounded team overall, between Julian Widdows and Catherine Silvestre, both of whom will serve as general managers for the NaturalMotion engine. Both bring varied experience to their roles, including Widdows’ work at Codemasters Racing and Silvestre’s work at Warner Bros. and Glu Mobile.
Clearly, Zynga is intending to create a broad range of products, and is staffing up with talent to enable that vision. We certainly wish the new faces joining up the best of luck!
Source: VentureBeat