Celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay with Doom designer Tom Hall and the PlayFirst team.
Categories

Gordon Ramsay joins Kim Kardashian in Glu Mobile’s gaming stable

  • Posted byby Jeff Grubb
  • Updated
  • 2 min

Combining celebrities with existing mobile games has worked for Kim Kardashian and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Now, TV chef Gordon Ramsay is getting in on the action.

Publisher Glu Mobile is working on a new game with Ramsay, according to chef’s tweets. PlayFirst, a studio that Glu acquired in May 2014, will handle development on the project under the guidance of Doom designer Tom Hall. PlayFirst is responsible for the popular Diner Dash games, and the studio will combine Ramsay’s likeness and personality with the gameplay of Diner Dash and Cooking Dash. This is a continuing strategy for Glu, which has generated a serious amount of revenue from Kim Kardashian: Hollywood on iOS and Android. The company now also works with Katy Perry, and this has helped it establish itself as one of the bigger players in the $30 billion mobile-gaming market, and it’s planning to use Ramsay’s appeal to keep that going.

“I’m thrilled to welcome undoubtedly the most recognizable and accomplished figure in the culinary world to Glu’s family of celebrity partners,” Glu chief executive Niccolo de Masi said in a canned statement. “We believe that the combination of Gordon’s global fan base and Glu’s leadership in the time-management genre with titles like Cooking Dash and Diner Dash make this partnership a recipe for success.”

Ramsay has 10.5 million followers across all his social-media accounts, and he is also regularly on television with his Hell’s Kitchen, Kitchen Nightmares, and MasterChef.

Glu didn’t share many other details about the game, but Ramsay did share some official art of his character on social media.

At the GamesBeat 2015 conference in October, de Masi explained that celebrities make for a great partnership — he insisted they are even better than purchasing the rights to a big Hollywood brand. He pointed out that people like Kardashian and Katy Perry (another Glu partner) have massive, loyal followings on social networks like Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat. Those people see that their favorite celebrity has a new game, and they are just a free download away from acting on that.