Mobile-social gaming firm RockYou lays off 65 people

Mobile social game RockYou is laying off 65 people, or 18 percent of its staff, over the next three months, GamesBeat confirmed today.

The San Mateo, California-based company has been steadily expanding and contracting as its business needs change. RockYou’s business revolves around its ad network and monetizing old games that it acquires from other publishers who can no longer make money from them. RockYou shows ads to the players and helps monetize the games, keeping them alive longer.

RockYou previously laid off 10 percent of its U.S. staff in December 2015.

“We have executed over 12 acquisitions covering more than 30 titles since 2014. Integrating these deals has been a lot of work and created many redundancies, which we corrected yesterday. We continue to focus on our core business and look forward to growing further,” chief executive Lisa Marino said in an email to GamesBeat.

Marino said that RockYou still has about 80 people in the U.S. and more than 200 in the rest of the world.

“Our India and Thailand teams have been critical to our strategy and can now take acquisitions direct rather than having to send them to San Francisco first,” Marino said.

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat at VentureBeat. 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.