Every Monday, mobilegamer.biz brings you the latest on who’s moving where.
James Nicholls is now production VP at Scopely’s Parallel studio in Barcelona. He moves over from NaturalMotion, where he spent two years helping the firm establish a Birmingham, UK office as general manager. Previous to that Nicholls spent four years at King and seven years at Codemasters. He’ll now be helping the Scopely’s Parallel team to run games like Yahtzee and Scrabble, and will be working mostly remotely, with regular visits to the Barcelona office.
Also joining the Scopely team is Thamyres Vasconcellos, who joins as analytics engineer. She joins from data firm Natixis and also worked in analytics at IBM for 12 years.
Miniclip’s head of UA Jacob Krüger has moved to FunPlus to take up a new role as director of UA. Krüger also led UA at Scopely for a couple of years, and has served as a marketing lead at Social Point, GameDuell and others.
He joins the State of Survival maker’s Barcelona office, which has doubled in size in the last year and is focused on community management, marketing, growth and creative services. FunPlus Barcelona is led by publishing VP for Europe and LATAM Enric Cabestany, who said: “Jacob’s extensive experience and knowledge of UA and marketing will be invaluable for us in Barcelona, especially when accessing new audiences and exploring new opportunities. Our goal is to continue to hire more exceptionally talented people to lead us forward in becoming a key actor on the Barcelona tech scene.”
Hill Climb Racing maker Fingersoft has appointed former Remedy CFO Mika Reini to its board of directors. Reini is also a board member at animation and game studio Nopia and Redhill Games, and spent eight years at Remedy, ending up as CFO. He also spent a few months in corporate development at the Max Payne maker and as interim CFO at Starbreeze.
Drive Ahead maker Dodreams announced that former Seriously producer Maria Maunula is joining as its new lead producer in November. She is also a former Nitro Games social media coordinator, community manager and producer.
Ludia has a new general manager, Jimmy Gendron. He steps up to the role after over five years at the company as a VP leading strategy and business development, and was previously VP, mobile publishing at Behaviour and executive producer at EA.
Sybo has a new live ops manager, Gel Woerle. She joins from Gamesmart Asia, where she was live ops manager, and has previously worked in project management at agencies like Pravy, Pivot, Digital Box and Wunderman.
New at Hutch this week is Dinesh Sharma, who is now senior game designer. Sharma moves from a role at Zynga in Bangalore, where most recently he worked as game and level designer on Wonka World of Candy. He has also previously worked on social casino games at GSN.
And finally, as reported last week by pocketgamer.biz, Tripledot appointed Daniel Freireich as its new chief games officer. He moves over from Scopely, where he was games president for the last three years. Prior to that Freireich served in senior roles at Aristocrat and Product Madness.
