CrowdStar Promotes Jeffrey Tseng to CEO; Peter Relan Becomes Executive Chairman

CrowdStar said today that Jeffrey Tseng has been promoted to CEO, officially taking over the reins from Peter Relan.

Over the past year, Relan stepped up from his position on the board to work with Tseng on moving the company from publishing social games to making games for smartphones. Now that the pivot has been completed, Relan says he again will become executive chairman.

Founded in 2008, the Burlingame, Calif., company was one of the first to feed off of Facebook’s social graph, by developing such hits as Happy Aquarium. But after Facebook shut down its viral channels, which had made it easy to get new users, CrowdStar had a difficult time keeping up with other social game leaders, like Zynga, Electronic Arts, Wooga and King.

Today, it is focused on creating mobile games like Top Girl for teenage girls.

In a statement, Relan said, “Jeffrey was instrumental in the company’s successful pivot to mobile social gaming. His four years at CrowdStar building free-to-play games, combined with his prior background at Sega building AAA games like Iron Man, make him the ideal choice for the next phase of the company’s growth in mobile.”

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Just as the atom bomb was the weapon that was supposed to render war obsolete, the Internet seems like capitalism’s ultimate feat of self-destructive genius, an economic doomsday device rendering it impossible for anyone to ever make a profit off anything again. It’s especially hopeless for those whose work is easily digitized and accessed free of charge.

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