Exclusive: 6waves Lolapps cuts development staff, focuses exclusively on publishing
6waves Lolapps — the developer sometimes known as 6L — laid off all of its development staff today, Inside Social Games can confirm. The company is now focused entirely on games publishing.
Context & Ripple Effects
6waves Lolapps has confirmed it laid off its entire development staff and is now a pure games publisher, a pivot Inside Social Games broke and which was picked up the same day by TechCrunch, VentureBeat, and FierceDeveloper — unusually broad syndication for a private-company restructuring. It follows the template Slide set when it stopped releasing new Facebook apps back in June 2008: on Facebook's platform, building and distributing games have proven to be different businesses with very different economics.
First-order effects
- The company's in-house game pipeline ends today — every remaining title it ships will come from external developers, and its own engineers are on the market.
Second-order effects
- Independent social-game studios gain one more publisher bidding for their titles at exactly the moment 6waves Lolapps needs inventory to justify its distribution business, while rival publisher-developers face a competitor whose cost base no longer includes studio overhead.
Third-order effects
- If the Slide-to-publisher path repeats, the Facebook ecosystem stratifies into asset-light distributors that aggregate third-party content and contract studios that make it — with the middle ground of integrated developer-publishers shrinking.
The trend: Social gaming on Facebook is splitting into capital-light publishers and external studios, with once-integrated app developers shedding their own production.