CrowdStar was one of the first studios to gain success on Facebook back in 2009. But, as you know, times are changing. Yesterday, the company announced that it was leaving Zuckerberg’s social network in order to focus its attention on developing games for mobile devices.
According to an interview given to the AllThingsD portal by Peter Relan, CrowdStar’s executive director, the company will continue to support current social projects, but will no longer make games for Facebook.
Here, however, it is important to note that Relan emphasized that the company is not going to develop, literally, “Facebook PC games”. In other words, we can assume that CrowdStar still plans to work with the social network on mobile platforms.
However, Relan added that although Facebook provided 90% of the company’s revenue in 2011, but over the past months this share has been declining. By the end of 2012, Relan expects that mobile games will bring most of the company’s revenue.
At the same time, the true reason for the company’s departure from Facebook remains a mystery. It is unclear why the company did not want to expand in order to develop two areas at once – mobile and social (more precisely, it wanted to, moreover, in October it officially announced this, but, apparently, it departed from the stated development plan).
In any case, for the Facebook network, which is going to publicly place its shares soon, this is far from the best news.
Instead of an afterword
A couple of years ago, CrowdStar was among the top three game developers. Now it is not even in the top ten developers. In the mobile segment, things are a little better for the company: last December, a successful launch of Social Girl took place on iOS. Her projects such as Top Girl, Tower Town and others are also presented on the mobile market.