14 DAY TRIAL // The former co-founder of the EA Tiburon studio says that he chose to move to social game company Zynga because he was where gaming was heading in the near future.
John Schappert, who is now a COO at Zynga, told Develop that, “When I was at Electronic Arts I worked very closely with the group that had casual, mobile and social, and you just saw the explosive growth that was happening in that. It’s going from a couple of hundred million gamers to everyone being a gamer, billions of people.”
The executive says that he has seen changes with his own gaming time, dropping the big AAA experiences that require many hours to complete in order to spend more time with smaller, more focused games that can be played in 15-minute sessions.
Schappert has worked for both EA and Microsoft and believes that big gaming companies need to adapt to a gaming future dominated by social and free-to-play titles.