It Girl developer CrowdStar announced today that Alex Galvagni, former senior vice president of global product development and CTO of Glu Mobile, joined its ranks this week as Head of Studios as part of the company’s strategy to go both mobile and global in 2011.
Following so closely on the news that Zynga formed a UK studio dedicated to mobile development, it’s not lost on us just how serious social game developers are taking the mobile space these days. EA and many other developers have had a head start on building up a mobile library that spans smartphones, feature phones and tablets compared to Zynga, CrowdStar and other social gaming companies.
Speaking to us by phone this morning, CrowdStar CEO Peter Relan and Galvagni share some of the short-term plans the company has to build on its mobile portfolio while expanding its Facebook games to the global market.
“We will be doing more mobile games that are not just companion products,” Relan says. “You can expect [the first of these] this quarter. You can expect one more major Facebook product this quarter and generally speaking one per quarter after that.”
In his role as Head of Studios, Galvagni will oversee most of CrowdStar’s swelling ranks and take charge of the games release schedule. He will also work to roll out the developer’s existing games to the global market both on Facebook and off, depending on the international territory. As for mobile, Galvagni stresses that it’s a big part of the strategy. “The focus is going to be on making good mobile products that work on the platform,” he tells us.
CrowdStar’s first mobile offering, an It Girl companion app, hit the App Store early last month. The developer is currently the fourth largest app developer on Facebook and the third largest social game developer behind Zynga and EA, with over 31 million monthly active users across all 20 of its apps.
Source: Inside Social Games
Thursday, April 28, 2011