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Stardock is planning on launching a number of new games over the next few years, and today the company"s CEO Brad Wardell announced that Stardock has hired a well known game designer to help oversea the creation of several unnamed games.
In a post on the Elemental message boards, Wardell announced that Soren Johnson, best known as the lead designer of Civilization IV, has been hired " ... at least for awhile, to oversee the design of all our games." Johnson was also the co-lead designer of Civilization III and later helped in designing Spore alongside Will Wright. Before being hired by Stardock, Johnson worked at Zynga.
Some of Johnson"s game projects will be part of Stardock"s newly revealed plan to fund a number of new companies. Wardell said that the company used the money that it acquired from GameStop in 2011 when it bought the Impulse PC game download service "... to create a fund to help launch new start-ups. We haven’t announced any of these new entities yet and won’t be for awhile."
Wardell seems to be very happy that Johnson is joining Stardock, saying, "I think his impact on our upcoming (think 2014/2015/2016) will be pretty obvious."
Source: Elemental message forums | Image via Stardock