Monday, June 3, 2013

Zynga's Loss, SGN's Gain

The announcement Monday that Zynga is cutting 18 percent of its workforce is throwing a lot of talent onto the market, to the benefit of the company's competitors. One of those companies, Los Angeles-based SGN, is already benefiting from the turmoil over at Zynga, saying Monday afternoon that it has hired a new pool of talent from Zynga, including a number of artists, an executive, game designer, and UI/AX artist. SGN put out a list of hires today from Zynga's FarmVille and other teams, saying that it has been snapping up a number of Zynga's best developers.

When asked, Chris Dewolfe, SGN's founder and the co-founder of MySpace, said that SGN is growing quickly and hiring at a fast pace. Although the layoff at Zynga does put a lot of talent on the market, Dewolfe said that it won't be accelerating its rate of hiring. Dewolfe did said, despite that, "we will undoubtedly continue to review top-level candidates from Zynga and other studios as they become available."

SGN also said it keep an open eye to the market for new available talent and recruits that are exiting Zynga in this latest round of layoffs, hinting that it might even look to pick up spin outs from the company.

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