Jeff Karp, the president of mobile gaming company Big Fish Games, has been recruited by Electronic Arts’ mobile game division. The gaming industry veteran will be appointed senior vice president and group general manager of mobile, replacing Samantha Ryan in an effort to unify the company’s mobile studios and development goals.
Karp, who was appointed president and managing director at Big Fish Games in July 2018, oversaw properties such as Big Fish Casino, Fairway Solitaire, and Jackpot Magic Slots. In January, Big Fish was acquired for $990 million by Aristocrat Technologies, an Australian gaming company.
Before joining the company, Karp was CEO of Sports Illustrated Play, which was acquired by Comcast/NBC, and EVP of Social and Mobile Games at GSN. He also worked at GSN Games and EA, where he managed the EA Play label, which developed The Sims and Hasbro games.
During his time at Big Fish, he launched EverMerge, a free-to-play mobile game with fairy-tale characters and gameplay that brings together popular merge and match-3 mechanics. This will be Karp’s third venture at EA. He graduated in 1983 from Arizona State University with a BS in Communications and Business.
Meanwhile, Ryan will continue to head up the teams at Maxis, which oversees the development of The Sims 4; BioWare, which has several projects in development; Motive Montreal, which is developing the forthcoming Star Wars: Squadrons; and the team developing the upcoming Skate game.
Although it is unclear how Karp will reshape EA’s mobile game division, while he was at Big Fish he stated he wanted to go back to basics and refocus the game categories that put the company on the map. He eventually discarded some games in development in the real-time strategy and RPG genres to focus on a “fewer, bigger, better” approach to game development.
EA’s mobile game division comprises Capital, Contingency, FireMonkeys, Pogo, PopCap, Slingshot, Industrial Toys, Track Twenty, the EA Sports Mobile Fuel group, and several mobile prototyping initiatives. The company’s most successful mobile titles include Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes, Madden Mobile, FIFA Mobile, NBA Live Mobile, Madden Overdrive, The Sims Mobile, Bejeweled Stars, and Plants vs Zombies Heroes, none of which are new releases.
Source: Venture Beat