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Mobile-social gaming firm RockYou lays off 65 people

Words of Wonder is one of the games RockYou bought from Disney and continues to operate.

Image Credit: Disney Interactive

Mobile social game RockYou is laying off 65 people, or 18 percent of its staff, over the next three months, GamesBeat confirmed today.

The San Mateo, California-based company has been steadily expanding and contracting as its business needs change. RockYou’s business revolves around its ad network and monetizing old games that it acquires from other publishers who can no longer make money from them. RockYou shows ads to the players and helps monetize the games, keeping them alive longer.

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RockYou previously laid off 10 percent of its U.S. staff in December 2015.

“We have executed over 12 acquisitions covering more than 30 titles since 2014. Integrating these deals has been a lot of work and created many redundancies, which we corrected yesterday. We continue to focus on our core business and look forward to growing further,” chief executive Lisa Marino said in an email to GamesBeat.

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Marino said that RockYou still has about 80 people in the U.S. and more than 200 in the rest of the world.

“Our India and Thailand teams have been critical to our strategy and can now take acquisitions direct rather than having to send them to San Francisco first,” Marino said.

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