New CEO takes helm of firm that keeps games like The Elder Scrolls Online running

People want games that just work, but this requires a lot of work and technological expertise. It’s hard for any one developer to find and keep that kind of talent, and that’s when they turn to a company like Sleepy Giant.

Games like The Elder Scrolls Online have hundreds of thousands of online players, and Sleepy Giant provides the developers of those hits with the backend technology to manage their masses. It provides the online stores, account management, and more that keep some of your favorite games working. Recently, Sleepy Giant brought in Activision veteran Diego Abba to act its chief operating and financial officer. Now, the former vice president of finance for the Call of Duty publisher is taking on the role of chief executive officer at Sleepy Giant, and he wants to pressure his company to continue evolving so developers will continue turning to it for services.

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“Sleepy Giant has been evolving for the past seven years, and I do not see my new role as disruptive, but as accelerating the evolution of the company,” Abba told GamesBeat. “Specifically, I am thinking of the ‘evolution’ of our core offering, and of our organization and processes.”

Sleepy Giant specializes in building customized admin and commerce solutions for large studios and publishers. It works closely with its development partners to provide them with exactly the features they need to understand and manage their players. While that strategy has enabled the company to land contracts with some of the biggest recent releases, Abba wants to keep pushing his company to stay competitive.

“I am planning to push and speed up the process of innovation at Sleepy Giant to ensure that our competitive advantage keeps increasing,” he said. “This means an additional focus and attention toward the development of our proprietary game-management technology, but it also means we are bringing our tech to the cloud, and making it available to a larger number of studios and publishers that face challenges brought by the constant advancement of technical requirements needed to stay abreast of the market.”

Abba points to mobile as a prime example of an area that is growing quickly and is also extremely competitive. He wants Sleepy Giant positioned to provide the services that top-end mobile developers need to get to the top of the grossing charts on iOS and Android.

The new CEO also wants to establish his company as a reservoir of knowledge that studios can turn to when they are facing issues.

“I am planning for our company to be a more vocal thought leader in the games industry,” said Abba. “We have worked alongside most of the largest and well-known franchises in the industry solving very complex technical issues. We have much to share and offer as insights within the technical-solutions debates.”