Last we heard from Game Closure, the young startup had just turned down offers from Zynga and Facebook on its way to a $12 million raise from Highland, Greylock, Benchmark, General Catalyst, and more. Even in spite of $100 million-plus offers, Game Closure CEO Michael Carter tells us that the startup is not eager to sell — not now, and not in the future. Yet, stealing high-placed executives at the big gaming companies? Not a problem.

Today, Game Closure, which is building a game development environment and SDK that makes it easy for developers to create, host, and deploy HTML5, cross-platform, multiplayer games, is announcing that it has poached Laurent Desegur away from Zynga, making the engineer and executive VP of Mobile Engineering. Until recently, Desegur had been CTO of Zynga Mobile, on top of being a veteran of Netflix, Big Fish Games, Amazon, Apple, and EA — to name a few.

For those unfamiliar, Desegur brings over 20 years of technical leadership to the young gaming startup, where he will be the most senior executive on a rapidly growing team that’s added 26 employees in the last year. As to what convinced Desegur to move to Game Closure from Zynga? Besides the high-price acquisition offers and big raise from notable investors, it’s found early interest among developers.

Withing 48 hours of announcing its private beta, Carter says, Game Closure received applications from more than 5,000 studios worldwide, and has seen the daily user data produced by partner games grow 1,000x in the past six months — across millions of downloads.

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