Every Monday, mobilegamer.biz brings you the latest on who’s moving where. This column is sponsored by Games Jobs Direct:
Looking for a new challenge? Search thousands of exciting jobs at some of the world’s most renowned studios and find your new role with Games Jobs Direct.
Gram Games: Three new recruits at the Zynga-owned firm’s London and Istanbul offices this week. Ben Seck joins as chief creative officer, moving over from Scopely where he was senior creative director. Seck has also previously worked at King, Disney and Zynga.
Another ex-Scopely staffer Tony Nguyen has also made the switch, and is now senior UI/UX artist at Gram. Nguyen was previously UI designer at Scopely and has previously worked in similar roles at Hutch, Future Games of London (now Ubisoft London) and Sega Hardlight. Onur Tunç has also joined Gram as game developer, moving over from the same role at Rollic.
Metacore: There were seven new starters at the Merge Mansion maker in May. Former Seriously senior QA specialist Alena Parfionava is now QA Specialist, ex-Supercell, Traplight and Wolt engineer Valtteri Pirttilä joins as backend programmer and Bhavya O joins from Ericsson as technical development manager.
Elsewhere, Hanna Kontinen is now people lead, smartly.io‘s comms director Katariina Juvonen is now communications lead, Maria Sara joins as executive assistant and ex-Playtika and IntellectoKids QA person Elena Barkova is now QA specialist.
Cosmic Lounge: The new startup, formed by ex-King, Seriously and Next Games developers, has hired another two ex-Seriously folks. Sami Sipilä has joined as lead level designer, making the switch from the same role at the Best Fiend maker. Same for Kalle Rönkkö, who is now senior level designer, having previously served in the same role at Seriously.
Sandsoft Games: Scopely’s former director of analytics engineering Marc Escribano is now director of data and analytics at Sandsoft Games. Before moving into games Escribano led data and analytics for Spanish fashion label Desigual.
Hyperbeard: The Mexico-based maker of Adorable Home has hired former Apple business manager and App Store editor Martin Melendez Olivera as its director of business development.
Mistplay: The loyalty platform has just added Adam Horwich to its team as VP of product for ad tech. Horwich moves from his role as head of product at Activision Blizzard Media at King, where he worked for nine years in several ad tech-related roles.
Moonee: Tomer Geller has been appointed VP of games at the Israeli firm. He joins from Ironsource/Supersonic, where he was head of game design.
Big Fish Games: Parv Bhargava has stepped up to senior manager, product marketing and ASO. He previously served as senior manager and head of ASO at Big Fish, and has previously worked at Jam City and Phiture.
Omdia: George Jijiashvili has been promoted to the position of senior principal analyst at the tech advisory and research firm.
FunPlus: Dan Lu has joined the State of Survival maker’s Barcelona office as legal counsel. Lu joins having worked previously as a corporate, commercial and contract attorney at law firms in Singapore, and as legal counsel in various international startups.
Play Ventures: As we reported last week, the early-stage VC firm promoted both Phylicia Koh and Anton Backman to the role of partner.
