Layoffs at Freeverse

Written by

Matthew Handrahan for Gamesindustry.biz:

Ngmoco has laid off up to 20 people from the team at Freeverse, a Mac and iOS developer it acquired in February 2010.

The report comes from an anonymous source cited by TechCrunch, but layoffs were confirmed by a statement released by the vice president of studios for Ngmoco, which acquired Freeverse before it itself was acquired by Japanese mobile game company DeNA.

Freeverse was long associated with the independent Mac game market, having produced beloved titles like Burning Monkey Solitaire, WingNuts, Big Bang Brain Games and many more. The company leapt into the iOS gaming market with the advent of the App Store and were one of the App Store’s early success stories, earning high praise (and lots of money) with early releases.

Last week, company co-founders and brothers Ian and Colin Lynch Smith e-mailed friends and colleagues to let them know they had left the company.

Work on several projects continues among the remaining staff members, and the studio is now run by Nathan Camarillo, most recently an executive producer at Freeverse, whose resume also includes stints at Crytek and Electronic Arts.



  • MrPhotoEd

    This major sucks. Freeverse had some great games. Unfortunately it seems after the first acquisition things started to fall apart. I had the big bang board games, which I enjoyed and still enjoy on my laptop, stop working on my newest iPod Touch. An E-mail from Freeverse blamed the update on IOS as the reason for it not working and because Apple changed some things in the background they would not be doing any updates. I wonder if it was some uber-manager from the mothership who was the one to put the kibosh on future development to save money on the short term.

    Just a thought.

  • D Pauw

    Ugh. Well hope they find new jobs. Have fond memories of their games.

  • Lukas

    Freeverse also published “real” Mac apps, most notably Lineform. Lineform hasn’t seen an update in ages, but I don’t think they ever officially killed it. I wonder what’s happening to that.