Splash Damage continues its regular appearance on this page, with four new hires at the company.
Diego Llorens Rico
First,
Diego Llorens Rico joins the studio as an assistant gameplay programmer, Rico previously spent five months working as a game developer for Simedis, working on LapEntryCoach, a laparoscopy simulator.
Richard Hayden
Still at Splash Damage,
Richard Hayden signs on as a lead product manager. Hayden has worked as a product consultant for the past four years, and has previously worked at Oneserve, as head of product.
Anthony Kyne
Anthony Kyne also joins, as a production director. Kyne joins from Mediatonic, where he has spent the past two years working as lead producer.
It can be difficult keeping track of the various comings and goings in the games industry, which is why we compile them in semi-regular round-ups.
If you have new appointments or transitions in your company that belong here, please send the names of the appointees, new role and company, and prior role and company to newhires@gamesindustry.biz.
Matt Francis | Chief technology officer, GameStop
GameStop announced the appointment of Matt Francis as its new CTO, starting February 15, 2021.
Francis will join from Amazon Web Services, where he s been engineering leader for the past year. Prior to that, he held senior engineering and tech positions at the likes of real estate startup Flyhomes and e-commerce company Zulily.
JC Torres - Feb 4, 2021, 12:23am CST
No one was really surprised though the disappointment and the fear were still thick when Google made a bombshell announcement on Monday. Although it doesn’t affect the game streaming service directly, the shutdown of the first-party Stadia Games & Entertainment studio still puts Google’s commitment into question. In the midst of that uncertainty both for game streaming and for the e-commerce giant itself, newly-named Amazon CEO Andy Jassy reaffirmed his commitment to this market, despite repeated failures of the company’s own Amazon Game Studios.
Amazon’s sudden dive into the video game market has always been a source of curiosity and doubt, given how different it was even from the company’s music and video businesses. It eventually became clear that AWS would be an important element in that enterprise and the launch of Amazon’s own cloud-based game streaming service, Luna, was proof of that.
Image: Crucible
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Amazon’s history with video games hasn’t been great. The studio has consistently struggled to make waves with its own video games, cancelling
Breakaway before launch and losing high-profile developers before they could launch anything. But after a major Bloomberg report outlining some of the mismanagement within Amazon Game Studios, the new Amazon CEO has reportedly confirmed that the conglomerate won’t be getting out of video game development just yet.