Two senior game designers have left social gaming publisher Zynga, but the mobile- and social-game publisher has hired a number of people in an ongoing effort to help improve its hit-making capacity.
Pete Hawley of Zynga
Senior vice president of games Tim LeTourneau and Steve Parkis, the senior vice president of games, have left the company. Both worked on Zynga’s Ville franchise, which includes games such as FarmVille. They join Maytal Olsha, the Social Slots chief who also left in the last month, as we reported Sunday. Such executive departures have become common at the San Francisco company since Don Mattrick took over as chief executive in July 2013.
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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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