Stuart Poole succeeds James Cox as YoYo Games’ new general manager

YoYo Games – which makes the 2D development engine, GameMaker Studio 2 – today announced that Stuart Poole is succeeding James Cox as its new general manager.

In his previous position, Poole formerly ran the partner relations, production and "operational side of the business" at YoYo Games after joining the company in 2010. Before that, he worked on over 50 games across all platforms in a variety of roles, including QA, design, and production across games like X-Com, Conflict, and Who Wants to be a Millionaire.

"Since the launch of GameMaker Studio 2, we continue to learn about how our community uses the platform to build inspirational games that push development concepts in the 2D space," Poole said. "With a talented team of true innovators, I’m excited to take up the mantle of General Manager at YoYo Games and evolve GameMaker to the next level of 2D games development."

"Last year was our most successful ever," senior marketing manager Andrew Turner told MCV in October 2018. "GameMaker Studio 2, because it’s an entirely new codebase, allows us to do more things than we were able to do with GameMaker Studio 1. As a consequence, we’ve introduced a lot of new things that we weren’t able to previously do."

Outside of GMS 2’s growth and its new features, YoYo Games also announced its publishing arm in May.

"We think we’re very different from regular indie publishers, certainly from the bigger publishers," Cox said at the time. "We’re only taking GameMaker games for starters so it’s part of our ecosystem. We hope that GameMaker helps people learn to become developers, to become successful. Then the next step is: ‘How could we help some of those, who need it, to be discovered?’ Because that is a real challenge. The golden days of Steam are over. You need to be publicising yourself, getting influencers involved. Whatever it is that’s good about your game and you as a developer, you need to amplify that. And that’s where we think we can really help."