{"id":41521,"date":"2012-07-06T12:07:00","date_gmt":"2012-07-06T08:07:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=41521"},"modified":"2014-06-04T10:06:55","modified_gmt":"2014-06-04T06:06:55","slug":"fiercely-independent-thats-just-how-east-side-games-rolls","status":"publish","type":"magazine","link":"https:\/\/brainstation.io\/magazine\/fiercely-independent-thats-just-how-east-side-games-rolls","title":{"rendered":"Fiercely Independent: That&#8217;s Just How East Side Games Rolls"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" style=\"float: right; margin: 15px;\" src=\"http:\/\/eastsidegamestudio.com\/wp-content\/themes\/esgnew\/img\/logo-final.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"280\" \/><\/p>\n<p>What could the one-year-old <a href=\"http:\/\/eastsidegamestudio.com\/\">East Side Games<\/a> ask for on their birthday?&nbsp;How about a little more space?<\/p>\n<p>It looks like they&rsquo;re bursting at the seams.&nbsp;But according to Josh Nilson, COO, they&rsquo;re nowhere close to capacity&mdash;nor close to giving up their very cool Gastown headquarters.<\/p>\n<p>Going from a team of 14 to a team of 50 in a year was all part of the master plan. So forget space: adding another hit game is always going to be on the wishlist.<\/p>\n<p><!-- pagebreak --><\/p>\n<p>Since being founded in July 2011, this team has firmly set their sights at being a powerhouse of social and mobile games. Along with Josh Nilson, Jason Bailey (CEO), and Galan Akin (Creative Director), this studio this studio is on a roll with several live titles including NomNom Combo (iOS), Zombinis (Google+ and Facebook), Blaze Runner (iOS) and their flagship game, Pot Farm (Facebook and Standalone).<\/p>\n<p>Collectively East Side Games has had over six million installs and have well over half a million unique users across their games every month.<\/p>\n<p>But even though pumping out hit games is great, it&#8217;s actually having more great people on the team to help blow out the candles on their birthday cake that tops the list.<\/p>\n<p>Sure there&rsquo;s a cool office; sure they have nice lunches served up every Wednesday; who wouldn&rsquo;t want at least an hour of playtime a day; having a couple of hits to their credit looks really good; and how about claiming to have a team with over 100 years of combined experience working at AAA studios such as Blizzard\/Activision, THQ, Crytek, EA, Rockstar, Disney and Ubisoft? As well, they have over 60 years&rsquo; experience in the social\/mobile space at studios such as DES Games, Hothead Games, Nexon America, Club Penguin (Disney) and Magellan Interactive. But what&rsquo;s really defining about the East Side Games culture is their drive to be &ldquo;fiercely independent.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Being fiercely independent and deliberate about not being the &ldquo;typical&rdquo; studio is reflective in the diversity of the team. According to recently hired Susannah&nbsp;Skerl (Social Connector and Talent Ninja), &ldquo;the ESG story is one of diversity. Women are very well represented at the studio, and there are folks from various backgrounds&mdash;some, like Galan and me, who met in the mid 90&#8217;s at studios like <a href=\"http:\/\/www.techvibes.com\/blog\/radical-entertainments-sudden-collapse-inspires-tech-entrepreneur-to-join-canadian-politics-2012-07-06\" target=\"_blank\">Radical<\/a>. Others are bright young talents like our recent hire Gabe, who was a wonderful fit because he was already making his own games and putting them out on the app store; his industriousness and drive fit right in with ESG&#8217;s culture.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><object style=\"display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;\" width=\"600\" height=\"338\" data=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/v\/gAtLQUVZfLc?version=3&amp;hl=en_US&amp;rel=0\" type=\"application\/x-shockwave-flash\"><param name=\"allowFullScreen\" value=\"true\" \/><param name=\"allowscriptaccess\" value=\"always\" \/><param name=\"src\" value=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/v\/gAtLQUVZfLc?version=3&amp;hl=en_US&amp;rel=0\" \/><param name=\"allowfullscreen\" value=\"true\" \/><\/object><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>The ESG team also highlights their understanding of how to promote people&#8217;s interests in developing their skills alongside the games, and technology they create. The studio founders have made a provision for staff to work on side projects on their own time, and &ldquo;fiercely&rdquo; supporting those efforts.&nbsp;Josh, Galan and Jason&#8217;s investment in the start-up space is more than lip service&mdash;it&#8217;s a daily philosophy.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>They&rsquo;re currently cooking up a new mobile game, coming soon to your iOS device that&rsquo;s possibly &ldquo;better than unicorn bacon.&#8221; Also in the works is a Super-Secret HTML5 game loaded with extra awesome. This birthday crew is focusing on making quirky and original social and mobile games with a bit of edge and a lot of humour.<\/p>\n<p>Without question East side Games is the epitome of work hard, play hard. But there&rsquo;s also no question they&rsquo;re getting great results and having fun doing it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>What could the one-year-old East Side Games ask for on their birthday?&nbsp;How about a little more space? It looks like they&rsquo;re bursting at the seams.&nbsp;But according to Josh Nilson, COO, they&rsquo;re nowhere close to capacity&mdash;nor close to giving up their very cool Gastown headquarters. Going from a team of 14 to a team of 50 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":54503,"featured_media":41523,"menu_order":0,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"magazine-region":[],"magazine-series":[],"magazine-topic":[],"class_list":["post-41521","magazine","type-magazine","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brainstation.io\/wp\/api\/wp\/v2\/magazine\/41521","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brainstation.io\/wp\/api\/wp\/v2\/magazine"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brainstation.io\/wp\/api\/wp\/v2\/types\/magazine"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brainstation.io\/wp\/api\/wp\/v2\/users\/54503"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brainstation.io\/wp\/api\/wp\/v2\/magazine\/41521\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brainstation.io\/wp\/api\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brainstation.io\/wp\/api\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41521"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brainstation.io\/wp\/api\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41521"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brainstation.io\/wp\/api\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41521"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-region","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brainstation.io\/wp\/api\/wp\/v2\/magazine-region?post=41521"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-series","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brainstation.io\/wp\/api\/wp\/v2\/magazine-series?post=41521"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brainstation.io\/wp\/api\/wp\/v2\/magazine-topic?post=41521"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}