June 23rd, 2009 by Arjan Olsder Posted in Companies & M&A | 1 Comment »
GlobalFun has announced their restructuring plans. The company will focus more on the publishing side of mobile games instead of actually developing them themselves.
As a direct result of these plans, restructuring will mostly hit the Buenos Aires based office which the company acquired back in 2005. The mobile games development unit will be closed down which will impact about 11 jobs according to a team photo. The team was responsible for development of a series of Cartoon Network games with Turner Broadcasting. This development deal landed in just over a year ago. The remainder of the office will have to focus purely on business development in the region.
“GlobalFun remains fully committed to the mobile games market in Latin America and sees a strong development and a great outlook for the publishing business throughout the region. We are very pleased with the work and output that we have achieved through the Buenos Aires development studio over the years. However, it has become apparent that we need a different type of set-up with regards to development capacity to execute our strategies and we have decided to act on that” commented Marcus Johansson, CEO of GlobalFun.
“From a games throughput perspective, there will not be any disruptions to ongoing projects and the process of securing development capacity for future games has been going on and will continue in parallel. Based on market demand, we will also increase our sales and business development presence in the region during the coming months” commented Bertil Krumnack, Executive Vice President, Sales & Business Development.
“Finally I would like to publicly extend our gratitude to the development team for the hard work they have made on behalf of the company and wish each and every member of the team all the best as they move on to new challenges” concluded Mr. Johansson.
UPDATE – As Bertil states in a comment on this post, this only impacts the Buenos Aires office. The company itself will continue publishing own developed mobile games.
Hi there,
actually the focus re publishing is for the LatAm office. We will still continue with own developed games and us closing the development part of the office in Buenos Aires does not imply that we are backing out entirely of development.
BR
/bertil