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Warner Bros: Respawn’s head of product management Giovanni Ducati, the exec responsible for Apex Legends Mobile, has taken up a role with Warner Bros as VP and studio head at the developer of Game of Thrones: Conquest. Ducati is a former director of product management at Scopely, and prior to that was senior director at Blizzard.
Playstudios: Playtika’s former strategic comms SVP Mickey Sonnino has joined the Tetris publisher and slots games firm as COO. Cofounder and CTO Oded Maimon also departed the company to take some time away from the business to recharge.
Dubit: The branded content developer has hired Regine Weiner as its new head of studio, who moves over from Epic Games-owned Mediatonic, where she was director of player experience on Fall Guys. Weiner has also previously held senior roles at Space Ape, Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network and Disney.
Rovio: The Angry Birds maker has a new design director on its Studio 6 incubation team in Montreal, Dominique Ferland. Known as ‘Dom2D’ online, Ferland was previously creative director at Square Enix Montreal.
Embracer Group: Former Google, PlayStation and Konami exec Careen Yapp has been added to Embracer’s leadership team in the newly-created role of chief strategic partnerships officer.
Before joining Embracer she was working in Google’s Stadia partnerships team, and before that had led bizdev and account management and PlayStation-owned streaming outfit Gaikai.
Dash Games: Former King producer/product manager and Playtika head of studio James Burford has started his own studio. He’s now cofounder and CEO of Dash Games, a new casual social games maker.
King: The Candy Crush maker has hired Yuvam Parmar as senior game designer. Parmar moves to the King team in Stockholm after a spell in game design at Zynga and has previously worked at EA, also as game designer.
Plarium: Former Ironsource growth strategy manager Megan Cohen is the new product analyst at the Raid: Shadow Legends maker. Cohen has also previously worked at King in performance marketing as senior strategy analyst.
Kolibri Games: The Idle Miner Tycoon maker has welcomed Sehar Fatima to the team, who will now be managing QA.
Metacore: Alongside the recent appointment of Johannes Peltola as game lead on new acquisition Everdale, there’s also a raft of other new hires at the Merge Mansion maker:
Neha Joshi (producer), Sanna Elomaa (test automation engineer), Markus Nissinen (marketing artist), Alisa Zhizhite (QA specialist), Iulia Hlusca (QA Specialist), Tomi Karppinen (QA specialist), Akiko Tomoda (social media and community manager), Sam Nassour (game artist), Tuukka Järvinen (analytics engineer), Sofia Lavaste (talent acquisition partner) and Jyri Kilpeläinen (game programmer).
Gram Games: Three are starters at the companies’ Istanbul, Turkey office: Tayfun Delibalta (game developer), Ece Yalım (UI/UX intern) and Merey Yarımdunya (game art intern).
Tactile Games: Three new hires at the Lily’s Garden maker this week: former Jam City, King, Omnidrome and Electric Manta designer Drew Stewart (game designer), André Krüger (QA automation engineer) and Mikkel Okholm (cinematic artist).
Carry1st: The African mobile giant has just welcomed seven new folks to the team: Ankur Mishra (senior payments manager), Jalaj Shukla (senior game designer), John Gyimah (technology ops manager), Kerstin Edin (lead artist), Mohit Punia (lead game designer), Nandini Murji (VP, finance and corporate strategy) and Siddhesh Surve (growth lead).
