From FarmVille to a $4 Billion Token: Eric Schiermeyer, Gala Games and the Founders' Feud

There is a particular kind of person who looks at a game and sees a spreadsheet. In the late 2000s, Eric Schiermeyer was that person at Zynga, the company behind FarmVille that turned Facebook into the biggest casual-games platform on Earth. One TechCrunch headline described him simply as the co-founder "who made numbers God".

A decade later he applied the same instincts to crypto. Gala Games, which he co-founded in 2019, became one of the best-known names in blockchain gaming. Its token, GALA, passed $4 billion in market value at its peak. Then, in 2023, its two founders took each other to court, with claims running into the hundreds of millions of dollars.

This is the money story of Gala's founders: how they got rich, how they fell out, and what is left.

The Zynga years

Schiermeyer was one of six co-founders of Zynga. At a company that famously tested and tuned everything, he was the analytics specialist, the one who built the data systems that told designers which version of a feature made players come back, and pay.

Zynga's success made its founders wealthy. FarmVille, CityVille and Words With Friends made the company a fixture of the early 2010s, and its 2011 stock-market listing turned founders' shares into real money. Schiermeyer later advised and invested in other studios, the kind of second career many games veterans have.

Gala: equal partners, unusual rules

Gala Games was founded in 2019 by Schiermeyer and Wright Thurston, as two equal shareholders. The company's bylaws required a two-thirds board vote to act, a structure that, in hindsight, gave each founder something close to a veto over the other.

Thurston came from a very different world. According to court filings, he had spent about 20 years founding marketing and sales businesses, many of which ended in litigation, insolvency or regulatory action, and ran a Bitcoin mining company in 2017. He was Gala's chief blockchain officer.

Gala's early money did not come mainly from games. Like a project Thurston was involved in called Green, Gala sold expensive "nodes": licences to run software that earned the owner newly issued GALA tokens. Schiermeyer's own later lawsuit described early Gala's node sales as resembling a multi-level marketing structure, and said much of the company's effort since had gone into moving away from it.

The boom

The timing was ideal. From the third quarter of 2021 to the second quarter of 2022, GALA was one of the market's best-performing gaming tokens, with a peak market capitalisation above $4 billion. Gala promoted a slate of games, including the farming game Town Star and the battle game Spider Tanks, and launched spin-offs for film and music.

For two founders who each owned half the company, and for a business that held large amounts of its own token, that peak meant enormous paper wealth. Neither founder has had a personal net worth published by Forbes or Bloomberg, so we will not invent one.

The feud

By 2023, the market had collapsed and the founders had turned on each other. On 31 August 2023, two lawsuits were filed:

• Schiermeyer v. Thurston: Schiermeyer alleged that Thurston took more than 8.6 billion GALA tokens from company wallets and sold some or all of them for about $130 million, and that he took and sold Gala node licences. He asked for restitution, damages and Thurston's removal as a director.
• Thurston v. Schiermeyer: Thurston alleged corporate waste, accusing Schiermeyer of using company assets without board approval, setting up related companies he controlled, lending himself millions, and burning or destroying about $600 million of GALA and shareholder assets. He sought damages of more than $600 million and Schiermeyer's removal.

The backdrop was a token "fork". In 2023, Gala replaced its token with a new version, saying it brought better burn mechanisms, security and upgradeability. Schiermeyer's side said the real point was to make the allegedly stolen tokens worthless. Thurston claimed the reissue cost him personally about $151 million, and his suit also pointed to a $5 million down payment on a private jet. The crypto exchange Coinbase reportedly declined to support the new token after its own checks.

Thurston faced other legal trouble too. In March 2023, the US Securities and Exchange Commission sued him and others over Green United, alleging an $18 million crypto-mining scheme built on the sale of tokens and "nodes". A US judge later refused to dismiss that case.

As of November 2026, we found no public report of a final judgment or settlement in the two founders' lawsuits, so we cannot say how they ended.

What happened next

Gala continued, but with a much smaller token. By September 2023, GALA was about 98% below its all-time high. In May 2024, an attacker exploited the minting process and created billions of new GALA tokens; Gala said it recovered most of the value, but it was another blow to trust (the exploit in detail).

Schiermeyer remained the company's most prominent figure, keeping Gala's games, film and music arms running through the downturn.

The Gala feud is extreme, but the issue at its heart is common in blockchain games. A traditional studio's founders own shares, and selling them is slow, public and regulated. A token project's founders, and the company itself, often hold huge piles of a token that can be moved and sold in minutes from a wallet. Who controls the keys to those wallets can matter more than who sits on the board.

That is why so much of the Gala case turned on wallets, node licences and a token reissue rather than on games. It is also why investors in later projects began asking for lock-ups, multi-signature wallets and published vesting schedules. Players rarely read those documents. They are, however, where a lot of the real money in this industry is decided.

By the numbers

• 6: Zynga co-founders, of whom Schiermeyer was one
• 2019: Gala Games founded, with two equal shareholders
• $4 billion+: GALA's peak market value (Q3 2021 to Q2 2022)
• 8.6 billion: GALA tokens Schiermeyer alleged were taken
• $130 million: what he alleged they were sold for
• $600 million+: damages Thurston sought
• 98%: GALA's fall from its high by September 2023
• 31 August 2023: the day both founders' lawsuits were filed
• $18 million: the Green United scheme the SEC alleged in March 2023

WGC's take and what to watch

Eric Schiermeyer is one of the very few people in this story who was already rich from games before crypto arrived, and Gala shows how a token boom can magnify everything: wealth, ambition and, eventually, distrust. The lesson for players is a plain one. When a game company's biggest early product is the right to earn its own token, the real game may be happening in the boardroom.

The two lawsuits, if they ever reach a public outcome, will say a lot about how founders' tokens should be governed. For Gala itself, the question is the same one every 2021 project faces: can it ship games people play for fun, long after the node sales are over?

Token prices are highly volatile. Nothing in this article is investment advice.