Citizenship Canadian Years active 2005-present Alma mater Simon Fraser University Known for Video game development | Occupation Video game developer Name Samson Mow Home town Victoria | |
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Education Management Information Systems & Marketing Employer Relic Entertainment
Ubisoft
Sitemasher
Pixelmatic Notable work Company of Heroes
Might and Magic: Heroes Kingdoms
Castle & Co
The Smurfs & Co | ||
Samson Mow chats about Bitcoin History and Security Tokens in the Future
Samson Mow (born in Victoria, British Columbia) is a Canadian Chinese video game developer and founder and CEO of Pixelmatic, a game development company established in 2011 and based in Vancouver and Shanghai.
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Early life and education
Mow was born in Victoria, British Columbia. In 2002, he obtained a Bachelor of Business Administration degree from Simon Fraser University in Canada.
Relic Entertainment
Working at Relic, Mow was in charge of game balance for franchises such as Dawn of War and Company of Heroes, the latter being the highest rated strategy game of all time and 6th best PC Game of all time. Later he was involved in Relic’s online division, where he launched Relic's website and was responsible for the development of the Relic Online platform.
Sitemasher
Mow was the business and operations manager at Sitemasher Corporation, a Vancouver based start-up that created an online web development platform. Sitemasher was acquired for $20 million by Salesforce.com. Mow represented Sitemasher at the British Columbia Technology Summit in Beijing as part of a Canadian trade mission composed of high-tech companies in the information/communication, clean energy and environmental sectors.
Ubisoft
In May 2009, after working in Vancouver for four years, Mow decided to move to China, where he joined Ubisoft’s newest studio in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province. There he served as an executive producer, and led the development team that worked on The Smurfs & Co, Ubisoft's social network game listed as one of the fastest-growing games by Monthly Active Users, and launched the game alongside The Smurfs movie. Mow was also responsible for the development, launch and operations of Might and Magic: Heroes Kingdoms in China, Taiwan, and Korea.
Pixelmatic
In September 2011, Mow founded Pixelmatic, a Vancouver-Shanghai-based company, together with a group of friends from Activision Blizzard, Electronic Arts, and Relic. With a Canadian management team, Pixelmatic’s primary development centre is set in Shanghai, which is supported by a team based in Vancouver, Canada. The company has been fully operational from June 2012 after closing a seed funding round. Pixelmatic launched their first title, Gem Wizard, in late 2013 in Japan.
Conferences
Mow is a frequent speaker and panelist at many game development conferences. His topics usually cover online games, future trends, and efficiency.
In 2011, he was featured in Game Developers Conference's Social Games panel named "The Road to HTML5 Games: Challenges and Opportunities" held in Shanghai, China, which featured five Chinese and Western web and mobile developers on the possibilities and implications of HTML5. Panelists who were included, aside from Mow, were GameHouse's Alexander Mendelev, Kabam's Andy Riedel, Kano Applications' Tim Teh, and RockYou Asia's Jia Shen.
In July 2012, he was featured in the Taipei International Digital Content Seminar named "Digital Taipei", alongside Jason Della Rocca, the former executive director of the International Game Developers Association (IGDA), and James Hursthouse, CEO of Roadhouse Interactive.