Disqus
Casual games platform provider Oberon Media has announced that it has continued its efforts to bring social functionality features to casual games by launching connected features in download games. This builds on the success the company has gained leveraging these features in Smartphone and online games and highlights Oberon’s aggressive push to bring social connectivity to game experiences on every platform as part of their 2010 strategy.
The connected social features allow players to link to their social network through Facebook Connect, see friends who are also playing the game, suggest the game to others and share achievements as they are earned in-game. Players can take advantage of these features in City Sights: Hello Seattle and Paradise Quest, both published by I-play, Oberon Media‘s publishing division.
Following this initial release, Oberon will optimize a platform experience that will be rolled out to their Game Center partners and allow for creation of “premium social” games. Oberon is also working with developer partners to test their new SDK that further leverages this new functionality and will continue to introduce these capabilities to global developer partners in the next quarter.
“Oberon’s massive footprint of users, games and platform presence represents a tremendous opportunity to leverage social graphs integration on a large scale.” Ofer Leidner, co-founder and chief strategy officer at Oberon Media, commented, “This can be done through enabling a large number of existing games to become more social across many platforms or through creating games designed around the social graph from the start, but optimized for platforms outside of Facebook.com.”
It’s difficult to envisage the tighter integration of casual gaming and social networking as something that won’t happen – with the momentum that each of these trends has, we can, and perhaps should, expect that even pick-up-and-play titles will have native social integration in the near future.
About The Author
Ben Robinson
Ben is a 10+ year veteran of the Mobile industry – starting his career when SMS was a still a relatively new concept for most people (!), he has now consulted on everything from bleeding-edge Mobile content, to the next-gen accessories you might view it on. As a result he has a broad and deep knowledge in numerous areas of Mobile – from network operators to device vendors, to infrastructure and middleware vendors (not to mention content delivery) – and has worked for companies in all of these areas! He is based in the UK, a hotbed of activity for mobile, and recently became a father for the second time – as oppose to in his younger years when he was happy spend time tweaking all manner of mobile devices to 'nth' degree, he now looks for services and hardware that provide the most efficient, compact, and reliable improvements to his already manic life! It’s his opinion that Mobile solutions should be there to help to make your life better – if a particular solution (be it service or device) isn’t doing this, he believes you need to ask the very important question of why you continue to use it... His focus at IntoMobile is mainly on Mobile content, services, and infrastructure, particularly as regards the UK market – and with the occasional look at devices. Additionally, using his extensive experience in the industry, he will provide commentary on the industry at large, with regular (and hopefully thought-provoking) articles.
