The iPhone has become a major player in the video game industry. Publishers are gravitating to Apple's App Store and iPhone specific companies like Neil Young's ngmoco are luring away top game industry talent. Today, ngmoco revealed that it brought on Simon Jeffery, the President and COO at Sega of America, to head up a new publishing arm for the iPhone gaming company.
Jeffery will serve as ngmoco's chief publishing officer for the company’s new Plus+ Publishing group. ngmoco said that the new publishing group was designed as “an opportunity for partner companies to access ngmoco’s innovative publishing framework, including the new Plus+ Network.”
“We are excited to welcome Simon to ngmoco,” Neil Young, founder and CEO, ngmoco, said. “ngmoco is dedicated to bringing a connected community of gamers the very best native iPhone & iPod touch games. Today’s announcement of Simon, Plus+ Publishing and Plus+ Network continues and extends our commitment beyond creative collaboration by opening our innovative publishing infrastructure to others.”
“I am delighted to join ngmoco,” Jeffery commented. “It’s a very exciting time to be shaping a new games landscape with a super-talented team. With Plus+ Publishing we are going to be able to create a system for great developers to plug directly into an incredible, proven publishing framework & network technology to help accelerate their games.”
Young first teased Plus+ Network during a keynote at the Apple WWDC last week. The idea is that it “harnesses the latest OS3.0 technology for iPhone and iPod touch games to give a powerful social network to gamers” while also enabling players of all skill levels to compete. ngmoco will be revealing further details about Plus+ Network later this summer in conjunction with new game releases.
“We have a long-term vision for Plus+ Network to grow to become the definitive service for iPhone and iPod touch gamers to discover games and friends, play against each other and ultimately gain success, bragging rights and rewards in the community,” added ngmoco founder and COO, Joe Keene. “We are thrilled to have Simon lead the efforts on bringing partner games into the network, and help build a robust community of players.”
Jeffery has a whopping 22 years of games industry experience. As President of Sega of America for the last four years, he oversaw all publishing and product development activities. Before Sega, he was the president and COO of LucasArts, which he joined back in 1998 after working in various marketing, business, and development roles for Virgin Interactive and Electronic Arts.
At this point, it's unclear who will take up Jeffery's role at Sega. We've contacted Sega of America and we'll let you know what we hear. [Update: Sega had no comment but said they'd have an announcement "soon."]
1 Comments
June 17, 2009
James,
I agree with you, Apple is emerging as one of main players in the gaming industry. Having the president of Sega on board is a pivotal move that can expand Apple's ability to penetrate the market and make the right moves. Couple that with a more inexpensive product (iPod touch and/or iPhone) Apple is going to be in a very good position to ostracize the unreasonably expensive PSP Go and establish itself as one of the main gaming machines in the market.