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Pocket Burger Games: The UK startup has closed its doors, CEO Mitchell Smallman has confirmed through a post on Medium.
“The truth is making mobile games that can sustain a business is hard, and always has been, and it got harder while we were running PBG,” said Smallman. “The carpet of an entire industry moved beneath our feet, and we were faced with a choice: change our company strategy to be safer and endure in the new normal, or double down on what brought us together: innovation, exploration and new games for new markets.”
“We did the latter, and we ran out of time to prove it in a very tough investment market. I have no regrets that we did so, as opportunities to do what everyone else is doing will always be around.”
Smallman thanked fellow cofounders Matt Down, Adam Sullivan and Jarrod Gecek (who is now at Zeptolab) and noted that ex-Pocket Burger trio Mark Ffrench, Dan Fiddis and Magda Mackiewicz have all found new roles at Marmalade.
Metacore: There have been four new starters at the Merge Mansion maker in the last month. Former Supercell and Dodreams staffer Soyeon Jung has joined as UI/UX artist, ex-Rovio and Flowstate Games marketeer Stephen Porter is now Metacore’s product marketing manager, former Googler Shuhei Watanabe has also joined as product marketing manager and Harri Mäkelä is now data engineer.
Sega Singapore: Rovio’s new owner has appointed Robin Ng as senior general manager of mobile publishing. Ng is responsible for the SEA region and has previously worked as a consultant, as COO at Gravity Game Hub and in Netease’s publishing team.
East Side Games: The licensed idle game maker has added Kyla Purcell as associate software engineer and Sofia Chupakhina as our community support representative. Purcell rejoins East Side having previously worked as software engineer intern, and Chupakhina has previously worked at Code Ninjas, 1C and Vancouver’s Center for Entertainment Arts.
Rovio: A couple of notable promotions at the Angry Birds maker this week. As she approaches 10 years at Rovio Ann-Marie Pelkonen is now associate director of performance marketing, and Rafael Lima has been promoted to expert UX designer. Lima has previously worked in UI/UX at Next Games, Ubisoft RedLynx and Tap4Mobile.
Flexion Mobile: The distribution and marketing firm has appointed Ben Crawford as a non-executive director. Crawford recently retired from his role as CEO of CentralNic, an internet services business he took public. “We are now embarking on our next growth phase and I am convinced that Ben will be able to support us in executing on our aggressive plan to become the leading games marketing company,” said Flexion chairman Carl Palmstierna.
Tactile Games: The Lily’s Garden maker has hired Mostafa Fakhraei as backend engineer and Roche Ng as game programmer.
Kwalee: Belka Games project manager and team lead Maksim Dudnik has joined Kwalee as game producer.
Bossa Studios: The Surgeon Simulator maker has appointed Daniel Nye Griffiths as its director of public relations. He joins after spells in PR at Canonical and Improbable.
FRVR: The browser and mobile games firm has hired Ahmetcan Demirel as product manager. He joins from Falco where he was product and publishing manager, having previously worked at Udo Games as product manager and Bigger Games as product specialist.
