CI Games hires Tencent and PlayStation veteran to spearhead development

Lords of the Fallen developer CI Games has named former Tencent director Tom O'Connor as its senior vice president of development.

The Polish studio said O'Connor will "spearhead" its strategic development goals and "help coordinate the company's internal and external studios across CI Games and United Label."

O'Connor will report to CI Games CEO, Marek Tyminski, who feels his experience will enable the studio to build on the "business optimizations" it has made over the past six months.

"On behalf of the executive leadership team—and the company as a whole—I want to welcome Tom to CI Games," said Tyminski. "He joins at a crucial time as we continue to improve the efficiency and quality of our titles–building on the business optimizations we've made over the last six months–and help execute the company strategy through the growth of our owned IPs going forward."

Those "optimizations" saw the company lay off 10 percent of its workforce in January 2024 to deliver "business strength and stability." A few months later, CI Games delivered record annual revenues but decided to cut another 30 jobs in a "final, targeted round of redundancies."

CI Games eager to realize multi-project ambitions, but at least one title is in trouble

CI Games is currently developing multiple projects including two codenamed Project III and Project Survive, the latter of which is seemingly in a spot of bother.

An investor update published in April revealed an external agency hired to evaluate the project found some deficiencies. "The Agency Report indicates that currently some of the mechanics of the game being developed under the project 'Survive' do not meet the assumptions implied by the documentation of this project," it reads.

"The Management Board after an initial analysis of the current status of the project 'Survive' and taking into account the results of the Agency Report, concludes that the game’s release date planned for 2025 is significantly jeopardized."

O'Connor, who also spent 15 years at PlayStation managing a suite of studios, said he will attempt to hone the company's production frameworks to bring those projects to fruition and take CI Games "to the next level."