GREE Closes OpenFeint, 25 Employees Laid Off - News

by William D'Angelo, posted on 07 December 2012 / 6,105 Views

GREE, the mobile games company, will be closing the doors at OpenFeint on December 14. GREE had originally said it would keep OpenFeint open until the third quarter 2013, but has decided to move up the date.25 employees have just one week to find a new job before they are unemployed. GREE purchased OpenFeint for $104 million in April 2011.

"GREE, which recently announced the closure of mobile social gaming platform, OpenFeint, is focusing its US business primarily on its own titles and developer partner titles," said the company in a statement.

"As part of the company's internal US reorganization, a majority of the GREE games platform team will be transitioned to new departments with redundancies in some areas. The overall GREE Platform business will begin transitioning to its operations in Tokyo as a part of this change."

"Our game GoNinja has had over 1.5 million downloads on Android and iOS," developer George Deglin told GamesBeat. "Even if we push an update in time, thousands of our users won’t know to download it and will get a failed game. It’s very frustrating."