More Layoffs And Downsizing At Vostu, South America's One-Time Frontrunner in Gaming
Vostu, the onetime darling of the social gaming world in South America, appears to have just had a fresh round of layoffs over the last few weeks. Multiple sources who have worked with the company said that Vostu laid off about 100 people and is now down to somewhere between 50 and 70 employees. Vostu has not replied to multiple requests for comment. This is a huge decline for the company, which took at least $46 million in funding from investors including Accel Partners, Tiger Technology Global, Intel Capital and General Catalyst. At the end of 2011, the company had around 580 employees spread across Sao Paulo, Buenos Aires and New York and claimed that 25 percent of Internet users in Brazil played Vostu games. So the company’s headcount is now about one-tenth of what it was two years ago. The company had an earlier round of layoffs around the same time last year. It looks like a perfect storm of factors created headwinds for the company. Orkut’s gradual decline to Facebook in Brazil ...
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Executive Shuffling At Mobile Game Maker Pocket Gems: Co-Founder Terry Steps Down From CEO Role
Zynga’s not the only one mixing around management these days. Pocket Gems, a mid-size mobile game developer backed by Sequoia Capital, is seeing some changes at the top today. Co-founder Daniel Terry is stepping down from the CEO role and becoming the company’s chief creative officer and executive chairman. Chief operating officer Ben Liu, who had already been running day-to-day operations at the company, moves into the CEO role. Terry said the company just posted its best quarter in terms of revenues and gross profit and added about 35 employees in the same time period for a total headcount of 140. “Things are growing well,” Terry said. “It’s time to take riskier bets in mobile entertainment.” The thing, though, is that the entire casual free-to-play gaming ecosystem is feeling the fallout of Zynga’s disastrous post-IPO performance. With marketing costs up from a year or two ago plus the lack of any overwhelmingly dominant leader on the charts, it would be hard to justify ...
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