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.