In June 2011, Californian social gaming company, RockYou, acquired Brisbane-based games developers, 3 Blokes Studios, in an effort to increase their portfolio of social games and developers. 3 Blokes Studios worked on Galactic Allies for Facebook as a RockYou studio with the aim of attracting more hardcore male gamers to compliment RockYou's more female-orientated audience from their established titles such as Zoo World 2.
Unfortunately for 3 Blokes Studios, RockYou has had a drastic change in business direction and they're no longer focussing on social gaming. Earlier this month, RockYou confirmed to Inside Social Games that they had closed down 3 Blokes Studios. From Inside Social Games...
“Yes, we wound down the 3 Blokes studio,” Josh Grant, RockYou’s SVP and GM of Studio Partners tells us in an emailed statement. “We have great respect for the team. The focus of our business has changed; our core capabilities are in monetization and distribution, and we reorganized last year to focus on our media business and third party publishing.”
3 Blokes Studios was founded in late 2006 by Marko Grgic, Duncan Curtis and Zac Congo. The company was later joined by veteran games developers, John Passfield (VP of Creative), in 2009 and George Fidler (General Manager) in 2010.
Contributing to a related Polygon article at The Verge, Fidler had a positive outlook on the future, revealing that most of 3 Blokes Studio's staff will be regrouping under a new name and their focus will remain on Facebook strategy games. From Polygon...
"The good news is we do have another opportunity, it's just a couple of weeks away before it is announced...
I don't think it will be the end of the team. Our employment has ceased with RockYou and we will be reemployed under a new organization in the near future...
We've developed expertise in developing hardcore strategy games for the Facebook market and there are lots of opportunities in that space"