Ann: Trading Halt, page-10

fingers crossed!

"Playside Studios: From EA To AR - Back in 2011, when EA’s Visceral Melbourne studio shut down, Gerry Sakkas chose to take a gamble and found an independent studio – bringing four ex-EA colleagues with him. This new studio, PlaySide, quickly made a name for itself as a creator of accessible and fun mobile games – ...“Our time at Visceral ended during the massive closure of the big console players in Melbourne, such as Krome, Blue Tongue etc, so there was not much work locally,” Sakkas told Gizmodo. “A few of us were offered positions over in the states within EA, I’d say half the team ended up going overseas. The rest of us remained here and joined either PlaySide or the EA Firemonkeys.” Sakkas says the decision to start his own studio was probably the hardest he’s made in his life. “Looking back now, the risk vs reward has definitely been worth it, because the personal sacrifices I made early on have allowed us to build an amazing company.” Sakkas knew he’d made the right move “pretty much immediately”. “In a way, Visceral shutting down was the best thing to ever happen to me. From the very beginning of making our first game we all had full control of our own fate, we could finally come up with important decisions and only have ourselves to blame.” ... “More recently our mission has started to evolve,” Sakkas says. “One of our key goals now is to be working on new and emerging technologies (such as AR and VR) to really show off what we’re capable of creatively.”"