Ins and Outs: February 2023’s industry hires roundup

Here are the highlights from the recent industry hires and moves, as published in MCV/DEVELOP’s February 2023 issue. 

ERIK MOGENSEN has joined Wizards of the Coast as their senior director of business development after 23 years at Games Workshop.

MIKE DIVER is now at London-based communications agency Premier as its head of games after stints at the BBC, VICE and the LADbible Group.

STEPHEN HEY will head up the new publishing division at Radical Forge in Middlesbrough, after spending seven years as an industry consultant.

JO COOKE has joined Bastion as a group director. They were previously marketing lead at Curve Games and Frontier Developments.

JASPER PICKERING is also now at Bastion, coming to them from a journalism job at The Independent.

ROSS BOWES has left behind B2B firm Champion Communications to take on a job at Bastion as an account executive.

MATTHEW REYNOLDS is now deputy editor at games and entertainment site Polygon. He used to be managing editor at Eurogamer.net.

JOHN COLLINS is taking on a creative director role at Formation Games. He used to work at Space Ape Games, where he helped grow the mobile hit Beatstar.

MARTIN KORDA will be Formation Games’ new narrative director. He is best known for the Alex Hunter storylines in the FIFA series, as well as work on Destiny 2.

RYAN MOORE has left PlayStation and Media Molecule behind to join the squad at Formation Games as well as a lead systems engineer.

MARK PAWLUK has given up agency life, and will now be at Activision Blizzard looking after the Call of Duty franchise as a senior communications specialist.

TOBY HEAP is the new head of commercial services at Flexion, leaving Huawei, where he was the principal business growth manager for global ecosystem development.

VICTOR HORBACH is now general manager of Flexion’s new distribution unit. He was previously their chief revenue officer.

nDreams has recently hired JAKE PARKER as their new content scout. Jake has previously worked at both fish in a bottle and Kwalee in project and publishing manager roles.

ADRIAN KOTOWSKI is the general manager of influencer marketing at Flexion, after his company Audiencly was acquired by them last year.

ANITA MCINTYRE has joined Airship Interactive as its new people & talent manager, having previously worked at Firesprite as HR advisor.

PETER MINISTER is Airship’s new lead character artist. He has been a sculptor for over 20 years, and a digital artist since 2005, when he discovered Zbrush.

LAURA DILLOWAY is Airship’s new lead environment artist. She has an extensive background in games, and has worked for Guerrilla, Sumo Digital, Inkle and Sony.

SALMAN IJAZ is Airship’s newest senior 3D artist, having joined them from Revolving Games. Salman has over seven years of experience in games.

DANNY HARTSHORNE is Airship’s new producer. He joins the team from Firestoke where he was an external producer.

Finally, SHELBY O’NEIL has joined the team at NVIDIA full time as UX Specialist after a successful internship. She previously worked as an English teacher in Korea.