Industry Veteran Jamil Moledina Joins Social Dev Funzio

Social game developer and Crime City creator Funzio has announced that industry veteran and former Electronic Arts executive Jamil Moledina will join the company as vice president of business development. Prior to joining the company, Moledina served as director of business development for Electronic Art's EA Partners program, which published notable titles such as Brutal Legend, Rock Band, and Shank, among others. Moledina also spent several years as the executive director for the Game Developers Conference, which is owned by Gamasutra parent company UBM TechWeb. Detailing his reasons for joining a social game startup, Moledina told Gamasutra that over the past several months, he contemplated the state of the games industry and "came up with a picture of the future where the dominant players presented games to audiences free from the friction of platform, technology, device, or price barriers." "Looking at the future that way, there were only a handful of companies that had the vision and the execution to make that future happen," Moledina said. "Of those narrow choices, Funzio was the startup that could, as demonstrated by their first game Crime City being a hit on Facebook, Google+, and iOS. I really didn't have a choice, I had to jump." Moledina said that in his new position, he hopes to introduce different, and perhaps more traditional products into the social space. "I'm not sure that social games have to be very different from digitally downloaded or other lovingly crafted and designed games from the console and PC markets. Clearly, people love high quality entertainment, they are organically drawn to it," he said. "We're at a very early stage in social games, where the model of cute, simplistic play attracts a wide audience. However, one can deduce that there is also an unmet market need for AAA action experiences." Currently, Funzio has 65 employees, and in May of this year, the company secured $20 million in funding to put toward cross-platform Facebook, iOS, and Android games.