Jessica Rovello became CEO of Arkadium in March 2015.
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How Arkadium survived when the Russians took over Crimea

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 10 min

Game companies deal with uncertainty all of the time. But it’s usually not the kind that Jessica Rovello, the chief executive of New York-based Arkadium, and her husband and company president Kenny Rosenblatt have had to face.

In the spring of 2014, as the crisis in the Ukraine turned into civil war, the Russian Federation invaded the Crimean peninsula, a region of Ukraine, and annexed it as part of Russia. Arkadium happened to have its biggest game studio — a seasoned mobile-game development crew of more than 100 people — in Simferopol, Crimea. Overnight, it became a Russian territory, with armed occupiers knocking on doors and verifying identities.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

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.