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Scopely: The latest big exec hire at Scopely is Eric Wood, who is now senior vice president of publishing. Wood joins after serving in senior roles at Nike, Zynga, Disney, EA and most recently at Activision Blizzard.
In that prior role as senior vice president of global strategic partnerships at Activision Blizzard, Wood led a global team with responsibilities spanning business development, first-party platform management and enterprise partnerships across Activision, Blizzard and King.
TikTok: Former Meta client partner Annie Belfield has joined TikTok as brand partnerships manager in the social media firm’s global gaming team. Belfield has also previously worked at agency Liquid+Arcade and media giant Penske.
Wonder Hive: This new start-up’s founding team was revealed last week, and consists of Jesse Sevon (Twisted Ark), Petri Räsänen (Huuuge Games, Double Star, Seriously), Joonas Palmgren (Futureplay, Wooga, Rovio), Alexander Häußler (Wooga, Seriously, Skunkworks, Pixion), Ilona Lindholm (Rovio) and Tero Paavolainen (Gofore).
The team is based in Helsinki and is making “interconnected hybrid casual games”.
Savage Games Studios: Charlotta Tiuri has joined the PlayStation-owned studio as art director. She joins after over nine years at Frozenbyte working on the Trine series, plus other games. Prior to that Tiuri was an artist at Digital Chocolate.
MAG Interactive: Former Outplay, Team Artichoke, Trailmix and Netspeak Games designer Alice Bowman will be joining MAG as product lead later this month.
Product Madness: Ben Judah has been hired as director of communications and brand. He joins from comms firm AxiCom, where he was associate director.
Lava Labs: The web3 game-maker has recruited Opi Chaggar as senior animator. He joins from Scopely’s Genjoy studio, and has previously worked at Warner, most recently on Hogwarts Legacy.
King: Hamed Babamohamadi is now senior Unity core developer, former G5 Games designer Oksana Samsonova is now level designer, Henrik Hedlund joins as lead analyst and Negin Ayoubi has joined the Candy Crush strategy and ops team in Stockholm.
Zynga: Lead player support manager Steven Bowler has stepped up to become operations manager at the Take-Two-owned mobile giant’s London office.
Lucky Kat: Three new recruits at the mobile and web3 studio this week: Leslie Lauw joins as web3 developer, and there are two new game artist interns, Nieke Dijst and Dave Van den Berg.
