Exclusive: 6waves Lolapps cuts development staff, focuses exclusively on publishing
6waves Lolapps — the developer sometimes known as 6L — laid off all of its development staff today, Inside Social Games can confirm. The company is now focused entirely on games publishing.
“6waves Lolapps will now focus on working with independent developers to launch and grow their mobile and social games,” CEO Rex Ng said in a statement. “As a result we have restructured the company to focus on key functions which include developer outreach, product advisory, user growth initiatives and our publishing platform. The re-structuring means that we will have more resources to continue our leadership in the social and mobile game publishing space.”
6waves Lolapps came into being eight months ago with a merger between Ravenwood Fair developer Lolapps and Facebook game publisher 6waves. Shortly after, the company secured $35 million in funding from Nexon and Insight Venture Partners, expanded into mobile publishing and acquired Smartron5 and Escalation Studios to beef up development in China and on mobile platforms.
It is unclear what will happen to Smartron5, Escalation Studios and the Ravenwood franchise at this time. We’ll update this story as more information becomes available.
UPDATE: A 6waves Lolapps spokesperson tells us that the Ravenwood franchise will continue to operate under an external team. Smartron5 and Escalation Studios will also continue to operate on China-based games and mobile games, respectively.
An additional source with knowledge of the Ravenwood franchise says that two of Lolapps’ founders — Brian Rue and Kavin Stewart — and former Lolapps CEO Arjun Sethi will continue to fund the upcoming Ravenshire Castle “to the finish,” which is likely to be three or four months from now.
March 19th, 2012 at 2:10 pm
[...] the company formerly known as 6waves Lolapps, said today that it has laid off all of its development [...]
March 23rd, 2012 at 4:00 pm
[...] of social games, and Lolapps, the company I co-founded 4 years ago. On Monday this week we let go substantially all of the development staff, and today is the end of my short transition-out [...]
March 28th, 2012 at 4:01 pm
[...] continues 6waves’ efforts to refocus itself entirely on games publishing, which began when the company cut its development staff earlier this month. Several of the games in this deal are already live: [...]
April 9th, 2012 at 3:00 pm
[...] time. Two weeks after the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco ended, the company announced developer staff cuts to the Lolapps side of the business, targeted at shifting all operations toward games publishing on social and mobile platforms. [...]
May 7th, 2012 at 10:41 am
[...] Castle is developed by Silverlake, a team of former Lolapps designers spun-off during the layoffs in March. The team has a relationship similar to to 6waves like any other developer working with the company [...]
May 8th, 2012 at 4:55 pm
[...] Castle is developed by Silverlake, a team of former Lolapps designers spun-off during the layoffs in March. The team has a relationship similar to to 6waves like any other developer working with the company [...]
July 5th, 2012 at 11:02 am
[...] was short lived — 6waves decided to move out of development just eight months later, laying off almost all of the Lolapps staff this spring in order to refocus on [...]
September 19th, 2012 at 12:01 pm
[...] clone of Triple Town, 6waves went through a massive staff shake-up earlier this year when it cut the Lolapps side of its company and was shifting its focus away from development towards social and mobile [...]
September 25th, 2012 at 10:01 am
[...] own. In March, they decided to cut the game development side of their company altogether when they laid off the entire Lolapps company and decided to focus entirely on publishing. Just last week, the company [...]
December 22nd, 2012 at 11:19 pm
[...] Triple Town on Facebook. The company then lost the second part of its name in March when it jettisoned over half of its workforce and pivoted from game development to publishing. We’re told by multiple [...]