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Zynga Appoints New Chief Creative Officer (ZNGA)

It seems that departures and appointments of top executives has become a routine affair at Zynga Inc. (NASDAQ: ZNGA). Indeed, on Tuesday, the social gaming company announced that it has appointed Tim LeTourneau as its new Chief Creative Officer. LeTourneau will fill the position which was left vacant by Mike Verdu, who left Zynga in August to pursue his own entrepreneurial venture.

Prior to joining Zynga about two years ago, LeTourneau, worked at Electronic Arts for almost two decades.

LeTourneau was VP in-charge of FarmVille 2, which turned out to be as the most successful game launch in last two months, before becoming as the new Chief Creative Officer.

LeTourneau will now be responsible for supervising game designs across-the-board, moving away from his earlier role where looked after day to day operations of FarmVille 2. LaTorneau will directly report to Steve Chiang, who is President of Games while Maureen Fan has been appointed as FarmVille 2’s general manager.

Lately, Zynga has made many high profile hiring and acquisitions. For instance, recently it bought core game studio A Bit Lucky and also roped in John Tobias, a co-creator of Mortal Kombat-a series of fighting games.

Besides there have been many other high profile changes at top management level that did not received much attention. For instance: Allan Leinwand, left his job as CTO of Infrastructure in Zynga on September 10 to become VP and CTO at ServiceNow, a cloud computing service company. Allan’s departure was followed by Jeff Karp, who left Zynga on September 22. Karp was the Chief Marketing and Revenue Officer.

John Schappert, who worked as Chief Operating Officer, departed Zynga on August 8. At Present, Zynga’s CEO, Mark Pincus seem to have taken over Schappert’s role. Pincus is believed to be working in close co-ordination with David Ko and Steve Chiang for developing games.

Alan Patmore, who worked as the Studio GM, departed Zynga on August 23. He is now VP of Product at Kixeye. On August 28, Mike Verdu left his position as chief creative officer (which is now taken over by Tim Tuorneau).