How Space Ape aims to become one of the big hairy brutes of mobile gaming (interview)

Posted byby Dean Takahashi
February 2, 2015
Updated June 18, 2025
19 min

LONDON — On the strength of the hit game Samurai Siege, John Earner has built a studio that has risen from the mass of indies to become one of the serious players in mobile gaming.

Earner was one of the people behind the success of Playfish, the social game company that Electronic Arts bought for $400 million in 2009. He worked on games such as Pet Society, Restaurant City, and The Sims Social. Then he took off to start his own company, Space Ape Games, in London with cofounders Toby Moore and Simon Hade.

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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.