Mark DeLoura, developer advocate at Games at Google, has announced that he’s leaving the company after just 5 months there. DeLoura, a veteran of the gaming industry and past lead engineer at Nintendo for five years at the end of the 90’s, hasn’t revealed his plans yet for what he’ll do next. “I enjoyed working with many of the people there [at Google],” he wrote, “but it was not the perfect fit for me.”
In announcing his departure, DeLoura wrote in a blog post about the progress Games at Google has shown to date in building apps in the browser and enabling greater developer flexibility.
DeLoura is the second high-profile developer advocate Google has lost this Summer. Last month, Android developer marketing lead Sun Hu Kim jumped ship to join Twitter.
The loss of DeLoura seems particularly notable, though, as Games at Google is still a big, unfulfilled promise. From a social software, developer community and technical perspective, not to mention profit, Google is getting ready to make a big push in gaming. Google invested more than $100 million this Summer in Zynga, makers of Farmville and other mind-numbing fare, for example. Rallying and supporting a thriving developer ecosystem, the job DeLoura was hired for, will be key to the larger gaming effort.
