Battlefield maker EA DICE loses three to ngmoco's Sweden studio

A new year can often be a bittersweet experience, especially in the world of career moves. In this case, it's been sweet for DeNA-owned mobile game maker ngmoco and rather bitter for EA. DICE, the Swedish division of the veteran games publisher responsible for hit shooter franchise Battlefield and critically-acclaimed Mirror's Edge, has lost three staffers to ngmoco Sweden.

This is the second, third and fourth loss for EA to ngmoco in six months, the first being former EA-ran Easy Studios general manager Ben Cousins, who left in June 2011 to start the Stockholm-based studio. Cousins announced the new hires through his Twitter account, name-dropping senior programmer Torbjørn Lædre, senior artist Wille Wintertidh and senior programmer Malte Hildigsson.

Collectively, the trio have experience with successful hardcore EA games ranging from the brand new Battlefield 3 to Mirror's Edge and Far Cry 2. Ngmoco Sweden has been keen on recruiting talent from traditional game developers, having snagged members of Crytek, German creator of the visually-stunning Crysis series, last year.

Ngmoco, largely responsible for bringing Japanese social game giant DeNA's mobile social games network, Mobage, to the Western world, is likely staffing up its Sweden studio to fill the network up with original games. Whether those games will skew toward shooter fans or folks who dig FarmVille is uncertain, but the lot it's hiring suggests the former.

[Via GamesIndustry.biz]

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