Hare's publishing ambitions grow following Jagex departure
"Not enough power" at Jagex for Sensi developer; new publishing initiative takes shape
Sensible Soccer developer Jon Hare has told GamesIndustry.biz that he left UK studio Jagex to concentrate on his own burgeoning publishing project.
The veteran developer joined Jagex in July last year as head of publishing, but admitted the new position did not give him enough room to make changes at the company, and he decided to split on amicable terms.
"I have been working on my own online publishing plans for the last 15 months or so now and when I joined Jagex as head of publishing I was very excited about being able to discuss and put some of these ideas into action with the most successful online publisher in Europe.
"In practise however, when I got there, the job I was doing at Jagex did not give me enough power to make any decisions in regard to publishing or development strategy and from Jagex's point of view they were not prepared to have someone from the outside have too great an influence on the mechanisms of the company too quickly. We both respected each others positions on this and agreed to call it a day on amicable terms," he said.
With his own company Tower Studios, Hare has already released Me-Motes Messenger on iPhone and PC, an instant messaging program which replaces emoticons with a realistic, animated photo of the user.
The longer term plan is to create a range of games which feature the Me-Motes avatars, he said, with the technology also on offer to third-party developers.
"Me-Motes is the first step in building our new browser and iPhone publisher called Me-Stars," detailed Hare. "Me-Stars is a cross platform games network and all games feature the animating heads from Me-Motes as personal avatars in and across a unified scoring system.
"Our game range includes new games of mine, new games from third-party development partners and bespoke iPhone/browser specific versions of licensed classic older games. Me-Stars.com will be launching some time in Q2 2010."
Jagex has gone through 12 months of change, with CEO Geoff Iddison leaving the company at the start of last year, before canning its long in development project MechScape, costing the company tens of millions, according to new CEO Mark Gerhard.
It most recently revealed plans to publish other MMOs in Europe, starting with Ultizen's War of Legends.