John Earner and his team of happy Londoners scored big in the first generation of social games. Now, they’re back with a new startup, Space Ape Games, and a hit title Samurai Siege, which is generating $50,000 a day in revenue from more than 200,000 daily players after just nine days on the market.
John Earner of Space Ape Games.
Earner led Playfish’s London studio and created hit after hit for the company. That led to EA buying the developer for at least $300 million in 2009. Under EA, the Playfish team released games such as The Sims Social. But as Facebook titles took a dive, their mojo dissipated. The “Playfish Mafia,” reminiscent of the Paypal Mafia that founded many Silicon Valley startups, left EA and then started Space Ape Games in London last year with a dozen Playfish veterans. The group wanted to create the world’s best mobile-strategy-game company.
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Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
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