One company's loss is another company's gain.

Although in the case of Jim Ying, GREE's new VP of Developer Relations and Publishing, he might be regretting the timing of his move.

His inbox looks like it's going to be full of angry missives.

Ying joins the Japanese giant from 6waves, which has experienced its own troubles during 2012; notably an ultimately failed merger with Lolapps, the failed acquisition of Escalation Studios and a lost lawsuit with Triple Town developer Spry Fox.

He headed up 6waves publishing operations, including WaveX, its recent excursion into cross-promotion.

Premature mothballing

As for GREE's current PR woes, that's because it's shutting down the legacy OpenFeint network to encourage developers to switch to the new GREE platform.

In theory, it's a good plan, but the deadline of 14 December gives developers little time to re-engineer games that in some cases haven't been updated for months or years, and all within the busiest period of the year in terms of App Store submissions.

[source: Inside Mobile Apps]