Big Fish, the most trusted global leader in casual games, has announced the promotion of Will O’Brien from Vice President & General Manager of Cloud Gaming to Senior Vice President of Corporate and Business Development. O’Brien is a three-year veteran at Big Fish, and has led some of the company’s most strategic cross-platform growth initiatives, including the acquisition of Self Aware Games and the launch of Big Fish Unlimited. His promotion reflects an increased company focus on global expansion of Big Fish Unlimited and other corporate development initiatives.

Big Fish's Will O'Brien gets promoted from VP and General Manager to Senior VP of Corporate and Business Development. He is the person to contact for business development opportunities at Big Fish. (Photo: Business Wire)

As the world’s largest producer of casual games, Big Fish offers more than 3,000 casual games for PC and Mac, and more than 250 unique games for mobile devices. Big Fish Unlimited is the company's universal cloud gaming service that draws from Big Fish's extensive catalog and currently has more than 150 games instantly streaming to PC, and mobile devices. The service was made available to customers in July 2012, and is rapidly opening up new avenues of growth for Big Fish through platform partnerships and entry into new markets, including China and Korea. Earlier this month, Big Fish announced that Microsoft Studios will publish Big Fish Unlimited for Windows 8 devices in 2013. The company has also announced partnerships to embed the streaming service on Roku and Wikipad, both of which are slated to launch later this year.

Business ownership for Big Fish Unlimited will transition from O’Brien to Big Fish 10-year veteran Jina Heverley, Vice President & General Manager of PC, Mac and Cloud. Heverley was integral in growing Big Fish's international footprint through global coverage of its web portals, clients, and e-commerce systems. In addition to running the PC & Mac downloadable games business, Heverley is also currently working on expanding Big Fish Unlimited services in Europe and other territories.

“Big Fish Unlimited is increasingly becoming core to the Big Fish ecosystem and Jina is already working on unifying our at-scale downloads business with the emerging streaming games service,” said Big Fish Founder and CEO Paul Thelen. He added, “Big Fish continues to grow and expand rapidly, and Will’s new role will enable Big Fish to develop additional business partnerships, seek acquisitions, and explore other ways in which we can increase the scale and scope of Big Fish Games global casual games business."

Prior to Big Fish, O’Brien was General Manager of Social Games for TrialPay in Silicon Valley, bootstrapped his own consumer Internet startup, and worked for technology firms in San Francisco and London. He holds an MBA degree from MIT Sloan School of Management, where he focused on Entrepreneurship & Innovation. He also holds a B.A., cum laude, in Computer Science from Harvard University. O’Brien has been featured in national press and is a regular speaker at industry conferences, including the upcoming Cloud Gaming Europe conference in February 2013.

About Big Fish

Founded in 2002, Big Fish <http://www.bigfishgames.com> is the world’s largest producer of casual games; dedicated to bringing engaging entertainment to everyone, anywhere, on any device. Through its proprietary, data-driven platform, millions of consumers seeking engaging entertainment easily discover and play PC and mobile games created by Big Fish’s network of more than 500 development partners and its in-house Big Fish Games Studios. The company has distributed more than 2 billion games from a growing catalog of 3,000+ unique PC games and 250+ unique mobile games, and offers cross-platform streaming games via the proprietary universal cloud gaming service, Big Fish Unlimited. Big Fish’s games are played in more than 150 countries on a wide variety of devices across 10 languages. The company is headquartered in Seattle, WA, with regional offices in Oakland, CA; Cork, Ireland; Vancouver, Canada; and Luxembourg.

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