Zynga Chief Game Designer, Brian Reynolds, Leaves The Company

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Brian Reynolds, the chief game designer of Zynga Inc (NASDAQ:ZNGA)’s team has left the stressed social game developer, according to the reports of Polygon. Zynga gave a confirmation of the departure of Reynolds, but did not give any reason or any other detail as to why the designer parted with the company.

Steve Chiang, president of the company said in a statement,

“Brian has a long history in the game industry and has been a great partner to the creative leaders at Zynga. I want to thank him for his leadership of the Zynga Baltimore studio in the design and development of FrontierVille, which brought many innovations to social gaming. We appreciate Brian’s contribution and we’re proud of the deep bench of creative leaders who are leading the next wave of game innovation at Zynga. We wish Brian the best in his next chapter.”

Zynga Inc (NASDAQ:ZNGA) is dealing with the departure of many of its high profile executives. Mike Gupta, who worked as treasurer with the game maker left Zynga and joined Twitter as vice president of corporate finance and treasurer. Another executive Dave Wehner, former Chief Financial officer of Zynga left the company to join Facebook. Both the resignations came in the same week.

The list does not end here and goes further to include COO John Schappert, infrastructure CTO Allan Leiwand, chief creative officer Mike Verdu, Chief marketing and revenue officer Jeff Karp, Chief security officer Nils Puhlmann.

Zynga trimmed its workforce massively in October last year, along with shutting down its office in Boston. Though, Zynga hired new executives, its shares  felt the brunt, it declined by more than 80 percent since March.

Brian Reynolds has worked with Zynga since 2009. Zynga hired Reynold to establish and lead Zynga in East in Baltimore. Before this position, he was the co-founder and CEO of Big Huge games. Reynold was the lead designer on games like Civilization II and Alpha Centauri.

Zynga Inc (NASDAQ:ZNGA) will release its earnings on February 6. According to Michael Pachter, analyst with Wedbush Securities, the company will beat the consensus earnings and will post earning around $275 million in the Fourth Quarter ending December 31. In the research report, Pachter mentioned that the promotions of current executives are done to restore the management team. Mark Vranesh was recently appointed by Zynga as its new chief financial officer. Executive David Ko, Barry Cottle and Chiang were promoted and delegated bigger responsibilities. This change is expected to bring back investor confidence.

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