Forecasting Cross-platform Networks and Mobile Games

Editor’s note: During the upcoming Inside Social Games Conference on June 6-7, Bret Terrill, the Founder of 12gigs.com, will be moderating two panels on the future of social apps, “Gambling Games: The Promise of Real Money,” and “Platform Opportunities for Social Apps.” InsideSocialGames.com had the opportunity to ask Bret two important questions on the future of social and mobile games.

InsideSocialGames: Is it possible to build a cross-platform gaming network? Is this something the world wants?

Bret Terrill: A cross-platform gaming network is something that a lot of people were chasing last year as the next big thing. The idea was: Similar to Facebook owning the social graph, a company could own the “gamer graph”, connecting people who liked certain genres across platforms and games. As it stands today, Facebook is really the only company that has been successful in creating a cross-platform (PC and multiple mobile environments) gaming network , one that has largely fed off their immense social network.

Other large games companies, such as DeNA and Gree, have had success in the Japanese market, but they have moved toward a publisher model in the last year. It is an open question on whether Clash of Clans players care about what other games the people they “friend” within the game are playing. I suspect the gameing industry itself cares much more than the players, who are more interested to see what is in the top charts of their phone’s App Store.

What are the upcoming tech challenges in mobile?

The problem with mobile is that, upfront, small developers have to make a rather large bet. To increase versatility, they have to develop across platforms. But to deliver the best possible experience, companies have to go native: For iOS that means writing code in Objective C, for Android apps that means using Java.

More recently some companies are opting for tech solutions such as Unity, which is expensive if you want to use the Pro version, or HTML5, which promises the ability to “write once, use anywhere,” only it does not really work that way. While HTML5 works great in a web browser, it is difficult to create a high-quality game that stacks up against most native apps (unless you are using the latest iPad).

If developers want to create social, HTML5-based experiences, such as the Bingo game we built at 12gigs, they will have to cut many corners to make it run on older mobile devices. That really hurts the player experience.

Another huge pain point for mobile developers is third-party SDK integration. Each one of our apps has at least ten SDKs built in. In many cases, developers find their game crashes because of a bug in one of these SDKs. Fixing the issue requires close collaboration with development partners. If you are used to developing for the web, it can be a very unpleasant, unplanned surprise.

Is building a game for cross-platform worth the effort then?

It certainly is not necessary. Clash of Clans, one of the top grossing games is only available on iOS. Its maker, Supercell, did not need to develop an Android version to become one of the most successful mobile gaming companies of all time. The fact that they have not developed an Android version, even though that is a huge untapped market, highlights the technical challenges of porting natively developed games across platforms.

Having said that, if you want to create social, turn-based games, such as Words With Friends, you definitely want to go cross-platform. Games that require interaction grow much faster if they are available on all the devices that your friends are using. Fortunately for developers, you can hit 90 percent of the smartphone market by targeting just iOS and Android.

As for building games for mobile and web, most companies are moving toward mobile-only development. Here is why: If you believe industry experts, including Mary Meeker, mobile is already surpassing the web in terms of user base. Also, Richard Firminger, the Managing Director of Flurry, says that 80 percent of mobile usage is not through the browser, but through apps. The point is: the world is moving away from the PC and connecting with phones instead.

Considering that Zynga just laid-off 18 percent of their employees because the revenue from their web games declined much faster then predicted, mobile-only seems like the smart play. It is where the momentum is headed.

To hear more from Bret Terrill and the future of social and mobile gaming, attend our Inside Social Games conference on June 6-7 in San Francisco.

Mediabistro Event

Get personalized advice from industry insiders at Facebook, Deloitte, Chartboost, Tango, and more at Inside Social Apps, this Thursday and Friday in San Francisco. Newly added speakers include Val Bauduin of Deloitte & Touche, LLP and Doug Purdy, Director of Developer Products at Facebook, so don’t miss the chance to add these valuable contacts to your network. Tickets are available onsite.

View the original article here

Game Insight announces cross-platform MMO Dragon Eternity for iOS, Android and web

While it might be commonplace for puzzle and word games to offer cross-platform play across iOS and Android devices, Game Insight has something a bit more ambitious in mind with its upcoming cross-platform MMO Dragon Eternity. Not only will Dragon Eternity be playable for free on both iOS and Android platforms, but a free-to-play web-based version is also thrown into the mix.

The web game of Dragon Eternity already has more than 1 million beta testers, as players are thrown into a world containing elements from both player-vs-player battles and non-combative roles (like those focusing on crafting and/or item collection, for instance). Via this storyline of war and struggle, players will choose to support either the side of Vaalor or Sadar in the formerly lush, beautiful world of Adan, which has been torn apart during the war. On top of battling other real-world players, Dragon Eternity's warriors will be challenged by a variety of monsters, bandits and more through gameplay that sees them exploring both open landscapes and deep dungeons.

Even in this pre-release state, Dragon Eternity already sports hundreds of quests, allowing users to take on thousands of enemies, including boss characters. Their item collections can grow over time, with rarity-specific items and even companions to take into battle, such as a fire-breathing dragon.

As with most MMOs, Dragon Eternity can immediately be compared to the likes of World of Warcraft, but the cross-platform play across mobile devices and traditional PCs is definitely interesting. Only time will tell if the mobile versions can deliver on the complexity promised by the existing web version of the game, and we'll make sure to let you know when you can get your hands on those mobile versions as soon as they launch.

Are you excited about the possibility of an in-depth free-to-play MMO on your iPhone, iPad or Android device? Sound off in the comments!

View the original article here

GameDuell’s edge on cross-platform games for Facebook, mobile and open web

Cross-platform games are a new frontier for many social and mobile game developers, but some companies have more than a years’ worth of a head start. Meet Germany’s GameDuell, one of the first developers to cash in on cross-platform games for Facebook, mobile and open web.

Founded in 2003 when bandwidth was still expensive by three people with no video games industry experience, GameDuell got its start as a web games portal that offered real cash prizes in skill-based games. Competition became a huge draw for the company and over the years, a strong online community formed around the GameDuell brand.

The developer branched out to Facebook and mobile in 2010 and succeeded in launching its first cross -latform game that summer. According to co-founder and CEO Kai Bolik (pictured), the company now has 70 million registered users in total; our AppData traffic tracking service records 3.4 million monthly active users and over 500,000 daily active users among its Facebook audience alone.

Speaking to Inside Social Games and Inside Mobile Apps, Bolik explains GameDuell’s strategy toward cross-platform releases going into 2012.

Inside Social Games: How did cash prizes guide GameDuell’s early development?

Kai Bolik, GameDuell co-founder & CEO: It was part of our concept from the beginning. People got a thrill from getting prizes and it made it exciting for players, so it was part of our strategy. When we started, there were sites where you would go play mini flash games like Yahoo Games where you play a simple flash game by yourself. What I liked is that we had this pure platform where people could interact and meet new friends and share their specific passion for the games.

That was something that we worked on very early on and we’ve grown very strong. A lot of the people that have been with us after one year, [even from] five years ago — 80 percent are still there. Once people like these games, they stay with the platform.

ISG: Walk us through your expansion onto Facebook and mobile.

Bolik: We started early on Facebook because we saw a strong need from the consumer side. With mobile, our first truly cross-platform game was in summer 2010. Users were actually asking where the mobile games where, so this was the trigger [to launch on mobile]. On mobile, there’s huge potential by itself. Android is growing quite quickly. Around Christmas, we saw 100,000 installs on one game because people bought the new Android and downloaded our games. When they know our games, they like to have them on mobile devices.

ISG: You told us you have 70 million registered users across Facebook, mobile and your own site. It doesn’t seem like Facebook makes up a huge chunk of that audience.

Bolik: We don’t necessarily focus on the growth of monthly and daily active users. It’s much more important to us that we offer a [cross-platform] experience for our users. That’s our strength. On the web, they come and play tournaments. On Facebook, people that know each other already, and mobile it’s having your games anywhere anytime.

ISG: How are your cross-platform games built?

Bolik: On Facebook and our own platform, it’s Flash, and then we use native code on mobile. We have some HTML5 test games running. But right now, we have the feeling that it’s hard to give the best user experience with that. You can do a really good game, but it’ll be inferior to the natively coded game. It’s sound integration, it’s stability — a lot of things that have nothing to do with the gameplay.

For us, “truly cross platform” is a philosophical question. The gameplay should be the same and it should have it the same feeling. But for the [type of] data that’s [moved across] all the different platforms, it really depends on the game. It doesn’t make sense to stop a Fluffy Birds game in the middle on mobile and then pick it up on Facebook. But for games with the same currency, [that makes sense] to have it be persistent on both Facebook and mobile. We really look at what we can do in the different areas to do the best by the user.

ISG: What kinds of promotions or user acquisition do you do for cross-platform games?

Bolik: We track and manage the game graph of our users — when they are on which platforms — and then we do smart cross-promotion on each platform. We have about 16 games on mobile and eight of them are truly cross platform. We’ve been doing that for about a year.

What we use is the concepts you see on Facebook — cross promotion bars and pages. I don’t believe too strongly in giving users something else, so if you play Fluffy Birds on Facebook, we will present it to you [on mobile] as Fluffy Birds. Users will download our games on iOS because they can find them easily and they go and play them on Facebook as well. Sometimes on iOS, we have games that are still [paid downloads] and sometimes users aren’t ready to pay — but they go and play on Facebook and then come back and download the game.

ISG: What’s the plan to grow in 2012? Will you shift to more of a freemium model for mobile and add cash prizes to your Facebook and mobile titles?

Bolik: On iPhone, everyone says future is in [the] freemium model, but we still see a lot of [paid] downloads. We have a portfolio of both and we sometimes offer two versions — a lite version and a paid version. I think it will move to a freemium version like on Facebook, but people are still willing to pay, so I think both approaches are right. We’ve seen different behavior in different areas — like in Asia, they prefer freemium and in other places, they are more willing to pay.

We haven’t implemented [prizes] on Facebook and mobile yet because you need a really reliable platform and that’s a challenge. [Instead], we’re looking at smaller prizes that don’t use real money.

We see the quality on Facebook increasing, but we see room to grow in the genre that we are serving. We are a company of 170 people which isn’t really small, but because we have our own platform, we still have opportunity for growth. We think now is the time to grow the cross platform offering for customers.

View the original article here

Happy Harvest developer ELEX ramping up cross-platform, self-publishing

Chinese developer ELEX wants to expand its social and mobile game business to cross-platform publishing and ramp up its independent games portal in 2012, the company tells Inside Social Games.

The social games industry knows ELEX primarily from farming sim Happy Harvest (????), which is the second-best performing Chinese-language social game on Facebook in terms of daily active users. The Beijing-based developer currently has 300 employees and raised a single $3 million round of funding from Tencent in March 2009. Coming up on its second birthday in February, our AppData traffic tracking service reveals that Happy Harvest still enjoys 2.2 million monthly active users and 860,000 daily active users on Facebook alone with a retention rate at around 40 percent (compared to most games that are lucky to see 20 percent). Worldwide via other social networks, ELEX says that Happy Harvest broke 10 million MAU in December 2011. Across all its games on Facebook, the developer sees 4.4 million MAU and 1.4 million DAU.

ELEX was one of the first Chinese games developers to cash in on the under-served Chinese-speaking Facebook audience in 2009 when the platform was still young and the developer was only a year old. In most cases, we see Chinese developers take an existing game that saw success in local Chinese games networks (e.g. Tencent, RenRen, etc.) and port it to Facebook more or less exactly as it is. This doesn’t always result in a hit game, however, as the Chinese-speaking audience on Facebook is limited and most Facebook-focused publishers won’t pick up Chinese games because they’re hard to localize in a way that appeals to a Western audience. See 6waves Lolapps’ approach to its Smartron5 acquisition as an example.

Though ELEX built up a global audience on social and mobile game networks in Russia, China, Taiwan, the United States, Latin America and Europe over the past two years, the developer wants to focus on its own platform services in 2012. The XingCloud service, first announced in June 2012, is an all-in-one platform for developers to create, publish, localize and distribute games across a variety of platforms — including mobile and PC download.

ELEX CEO Binsen Tang tells us that XingCloud’s real value is in providing developers with data analysis — an area where he thinks most developers make mistakes.

“Data analyzing is different for Chinese developers,” he explains. “The details in games are often unnoticed. [In] the last few years, Chinese developers have focused more on customer experience, and thinking from the point of view of the player. This is why we’re investing a lot in XingCloud.”

The company is also using 2012 to focus on its own games portal, 337.com. This is a move some Western social game developers like Kabam are making, whenever they reach a certain critical mass of users. Though maintaining an independent platform can be expensive — and risky, if their audience will not follow the game off of Facebook onto a new platform — some developers see it as the best way to maximize profit because they don’t have to pay out fees and revenue shares to platform operators.

In ELEX’s case, this is not quite true as its games see the highest average revenue per user rates on Facebook. (For context, Tang tells us that Happy Harvest is its best monetized game at $1 ARPU.) ELEX reports that in the past two years, its signed over 20 publishers to the platform and enjoys over 10 million MAU and 500,000 daily user visits. Tang claims the platform is popular with Latin American and European players thanks in part to its focus on more “hardcore” games like shooters, racing games and action games. Interestingly, the 337.com interface currently looks a lot like Facebook’s canvas app interface:

The largest opportunity for ELEX in 2012, however, may prove to be mobile as the developer is only just getting its footing on iOS and Android with a Happy Harvest sequel and several original titles. Tang says that though Facebook has been a good investment for ELEX, it’s important for all Chinese developers to keep a second eye on the local market, which is continuing to grow.

“Facebook is already a very successful SNS platform,” he says, “but it is still mainly for English speaking countries.”

View the original article here

Outplay Entertainment Ltd Kicks off Cross-Platform Business on Facebook

Android, Business, casual, Design, facebook, Featured, Funding, international, iPad, iphone, Marketing, Metrics, Mobile, News, Social Games

Scotland-based newcomer Outplay Entertainment enters the social and mobile game market this month with two games launched on Facebook that will eventually become cross-platform experiences on iOS and Android in the first quarter of 2012.

The term “cross-platform” has been used a lot by developers in the last year as Facebook-spawned devs make their first attempts at mobile games and mobile developers attempt to migrate their apps to Facebook and other social networks. It can mean two completely unrelated games that share a common theme, like CrowdStar’s It Girl for Facebook and Top Girl for mobile. It can mean a game that is identical across all platforms, but not connected by platforms, such as Rovio’s Angry Birds on G+ versus Angry Birds on just about every other device under the sun. It can also mean games that are the same game no matter what device the player users, like Zynga’s Words With Friends — which is what many developers term “true” cross-platform play.

Outplay Entertainment currently falls toward the Words With Friends end of the spectrum with its two games, Booty Quest and Word Trick. When the mobile versions launch, players will be able to initiate games on Facebook and then have that same game immediately available to them on iPhone or Android if they switch devices. For future projects, the developer may lean more toward CrowdStar’s cross-platform model where one platform has the “main” gameplay experience while another platform provides supplemental elements. Similar to what Ubisoft has planned for its upcoming Ghost Recon games, this could take the form of a mobile companion game generating additional currency or experience points for the Facebook main game.

For now, though, Outplay is focused on getting its foot in the social-mobile games door and scaling quickly. Though there is some skepticism that developers cannot use Facebook as a sustainable starting point on which to build a business, the developer feels it has an edge by virtue of experience, compelling gameplay, and ample resources to direct toward marketing. The company was founded by brothers Richard and Doug Hare, two video game industry veterans that have come a long way from 1997 when they first founded a development studio focused on porting Windows games to the PlayStation console. In the following interview, the brothers outline Outplay’s approach to the rapidly shifting market:

Inside Social Games: How two brothers can work together without killing each other?

Richard Hare, Outplay Entertainment Co-Founder (pictured right): It’s probably the fact that we grew up playing games together. It’s been a hobby and then it became a common interest. The first company of scale we created was The Collective, which we formed in 1997 with one other business partner, and focused on console development. We grew that over the course of eight years to 150 people, then we merged with Backbone Entertainment in 2005.

Doug Hare, Outplay Entertainment Co-Founder (pictured right, with child): We merged the companies, created Foundation 9 Entertainment, and then sold the majority of it in 2006. As a result of that investment, we grew to about 800 people in 11 different studios. That’s when we started [researching] Facebook as a platform and at the same time saw the [rise] of Apple with the launch of the App Store. It was difficult to go after those markets from within our company, so it ended up being easier to start a new company. We’re still substantial individual shareholders at Foundation 9, but we have no operational involvement.

ISG: How did you end up back in your native country, Scotland? What’s the development culture like there?

Doug: We started with the idea of doing Outplay in the states as a very virtualized company with lots of different individuals collaborating on the product — after 800 people, we were drawn to the idea of a small company. As we refined our view of the market, it became apparent that games were services rather than products you could fire [off] and forget, so we started realizing that we needed a fairly substantial internal capacity. We started looking at various locations where we could set that up, and [chose] Scotland. We came to that realization around April or May of last year and came back in September to start meeting with VCs and angels investors. We officially opened our doors in April 2011.

We can’t claim to be experts, but a lot of stuff happened while we were away [from Scotland]. But one of the surprising things [about] Scotland is that it’s the home of Lemmings and Grand Theft Auto. Those games originated here and Grand Theft Auto is still developed here. [Video games] is not a huge industry in terms of headcount, but in terms of the size of the country — five million people — the amount of relevance is amazing for such a small country.

ISG: We’ve heard some people say that Facebook isn’t the best place to launch a studio anymore now that Zynga dominates the market and cost per install (CPI) is really high. Where do you see opportunity on the platform?

Doug: It’s a question of having the type of product people want to play. Whether it’s the App Store, the Android Market, Facebook, or Xbox Live, they have the same challenges around discoverability — grabbing people’s attention so that they come back. [The opportunity] comes from the quality of the product that we create, the genres that we select, and the part where we can direct a reasonable amount of marketing toward [the games] to get traction. We’re not trying to be Zynga, we’re not trying to compete for the same audience. They’re an atypical outlying phenomenon. We’re making different types of games that will ultimately attract a different audience.

ISG: Booty Quest is a match-3 game and Word Trick is more like more like Scrabble, both very casual older female-skewing genres. Is that the demographic you’re primarily focused on?

Richard: There’s a multitude of reasons why we led with those genres. From our perspective, they’re great games. It’s a style of casual game that we enjoy playing. And because we’re forming a new team in a new country, we wanted smaller scale products with a relatively constrained and focused style of developing. From a market analysis standpoint, they seemed like logical bets to start with [because] even though there are many match-3 games, there’s a large appetite for that style of entertainment. We also felt we could create something that was innovative within those [genres]. These are an exercise in proving out the team and proving out our product. As we move into next year, you’re going to see more complexity in content types and development.

ISG: How do you offset CPI on new games, being such a new studio? Is it all in the marketing or will you integrate an ad platform or hot new viral mechanic no one’s thought of yet?

Doug: We’re moving rapidly and beyond simple raw marketing. We have other secret sauce as to how we [attract] audiences that we’ll be rolling out next year. It’s something along the lines of what you mentioned — only it’s saucier and more secret.

ISG: On the cross-platform side, what’s your approach? Are you using HTML5 or building native apps by platform?

Doug: We built our own technology for cross-platform development. HTML5 is interesting, but the experience that we have on mobile devices is just not something that you’d be able to get on HTML5 right now.

Word Trick and Booty Quest exist very happily on [PC or mobile]; the experience is satisfying regardless of the platform. However, that’s [not the case] for most types of games. Taking another type of game and making the same experience [on multiple platforms], one of them is going to be a pure experience on one of the platforms whether you like it or not. We’re not going to make the games identical all the time; we’re going to have games that you want to play on Facebook, on PC. And then we’ll have another game that’s a different experience [but related to the Facebook game] on a different platform. The two games are standalone, but if you play both, you’ll move faster through the experience. It’ll be a better experience overall.

There are other companies that are doing this. But there will be a change in the patterns that people play [by] and we want to have an approach to where we’ll be there whenever [the player] want us, no matter what the device.

Richard: The key is being sensitive to the context of the platform you’re playing on. There’s certain things that work extremely well or are only possible on mobile. We want to make sure it’s not going to be an exercise in porting between desktop and mobile, but trying to recognize the true experience based on the context. We’re not going to do, “Here’s the Facebook game,” and then a few months later, “Here’s the mobile game.”

ISG: You define your games as “skill-based,” even though they’re not actually related to the concept of gambling — where players compete against one another to earn prizes relative to their skill. What does the term “skill-based” mean in the context of your games?

Richard: One way of looking at it would be that there’s always a level of challenge that can be worked and mastered. That’s something that has a natural appeal and draw over time because it’s not too easy. With gameplay mechanics, we want to make sure that it’s always rewarding and satisfying. It’s finding the right level of skill or challenge. That will be based on the style of product — [Booty Quest] is more reaction-based while [Word Trick] challenges your vocabulary.

Doug: Both games require you to develop [a skill]. It’s rewarding to see your development of that skill, more fundamentally satisfying than games that are based on patience. The term “skill-based” reflects casino gaming, but the idea is really that you’re demonstrating a skill and the evolution of that skill is underpinning the overall enjoyment. There are a lot of games on Facebook that don’t have the requirements for what [we define as] skill. They have behaviors that can be rewarded, but there’s no change in behavior.

ISG: What does the road ahead look like for you, beyond launching new products? Are you in the process of raising funding?
Doug: We raised our seed funding at the start of the year, so we’re not raising money right now. When we pitched the company as an investment opportunity, the idea was that we were going into it [with] the functionality a publisher would have — dedicated community management, dedicated quality assurance, marketing, and public relations. We’re at 32 people right now — we started with two in April — and we grew ourselves in the space of three-and-a-half months. We’ve built these games and mobile versions that are nearly complete. What we’ve accomplished, when you think about it, is quite a lot.

View the original article here

King.com’s Miner Speed Sees Growth On Facebook With Cross-Platform Strategy

Miner Speed is the first of King.com’s games to receive the cross-platform treatment from the developer on iOS. The match-3 title has grown steadily in the last 30 days to a high of over 1.3 million monthly active users and its numbers continue to climb.

Gameplay adheres to the match-3 formula of switching two tiles to create a match of three or more of the same color gems in a row. This game is played on an eight by eight board with a sixty second timer. Players can see where they rank on three different leader boards that are reset each week; their standing among their friends, their country and across all Facebook players that play the game. Friends can gift each other a bomb boost that clears the board completely and inform their friends when they surpass their scores by posting a message on their wall in a little friendly “trash talk” not unlike Bejeweled Blitz’s Jabber.

Players earn coins with each game they play with scores also earning experience points, and badges are awarded for high scores. With coins, players buy boosts which are unlocked by consecutive days playing the game. The final two boost types are earned by inviting friends to play the game.

The game monetizes via Facebook Credits which is used to buy coins and also to unlock a permanent fourth booster slot so that four boosters may be used at a time. Players can also spin a wheel to win a number of coins after watching a promotional video at the beginning of the game.

Because Miner Speed maintains a shallow mechanic and quick pace well-suited to mobile players, the game was a natural choice for King.com’s cross-platform strategy. At present, the only things that are shared between the Facebook game and the iOS game are top scores, which the iOS app tracks by syncing players with Facebook Connect. Wallets of coins are kept completely separate.

Miner Speed is a very fast game compared to other match-3 games like Poseidon’s Realm by Reiner Knizia, which is a decidedly deliberate game. It is also faster than Bejeweled Blitz or Fortune Stones’ Frenzy mode. The blasting and swooshing sound effects and upbeat music are also unique style choices, evoking images of classic cartoon shows like Looney Toons. This and a user base already familiar with King.com’s games likely contribute to the rapid growth of the game in an increasingly crowded match 3 space.

Readers can continue to follow the growth of these games on our data tracking service, AppData.

View the original article here

King.com Games Gain Growth Through Cross-Platform Play

Online social games service King.com aims to be ahead of the cross-platform game with mobile apps for its leading Facebook and online titles. The first of these, match-3 game Miner Speed, hit iOS devices just last week as a free app.

Even before the app went live, King.com was already seeing strong growth across several of its titles. Puzzle Saga, Bubble Saga, Miner Speed and the developer’s games portal all occupied spots in our weekly lists of top 20 games by growth on AppData in the last month. By launching Miner Speed on mobile devices, King.com hopes for more growth as new users discover the games via mobile app markets.

King.com’s Lars Jornow, Director of Product Performance on Social & Mobile, explains that first-time users installing the free Miner Speed app are prompted to sign on with Facebook Connect. Doing so unlocks boosts in both the Facebook game and the mobile game, and 25,000 free Coins within each version. This grants new users arriving at Miner Speed through mobile games twice the free currency an existing online user gets from signing into Miner Speed through Facebook or King.com for the first time. Mobile users signing on with Facebook Connect also count towards Miner Speed’s MAU and DAU numbers on Facebook because they’re registered as new users if they haven’t previously installed the app on their Facebook account.

“We chose Miner Speed because it’s one of the easier titles to [build] for cross-platform,” Jornow tells us. “We keep the wallets separate on Facebook and mobile, but the scores stay the same.”

Cross-platform mobile apps are difficult for most Facebook game developers to integrate because of technical limitations between platforms and because of the different payment ecosystems. Most mobile platforms don’t support Flash or daily updates that some Facebook developers rely on to maintain their games, and inconsistent network connections on mobile devices make it synchronous gameplay very difficult. Apple actively blocks Flash on iOS devices and is only barely supported by Android. In-game payments on Facebook are done with Facebook Credits while in-app purchases on iOS are handled through iTunes, which is why Miner Speed keeps the wallets on each version separate.

Zynga only has a few mobile apps live for its leading games so far, and aside from FarmVille topping a few iOS charts, we haven’t heard much to suggest that they’re especially successful. Even so, cross-platform is where many feel the social/mobile market is going and so we see companies staffing up on mobile developers and searching for ways to integrate their Facebook brands onto mobile devices through companion apps, stripped down versions of the Facebook app, or through independent apps that carry the same name.

Miner Speed proved to be an easy build for King.com because of its single-player, asynchronous gameplay. Like Bejeweled, players aim to connect rows or columns of like-colored gems to clear the set and earn points within a time limit. The only social element of the game that relies on Facebook is the score-tracking among different users, which King.com uses to build weekly tournaments between friends, regions, and on a global level.

“Tournaments are our DNA,” Jornow says. “We want to bring that to iOS.”

You can track Miner Speed’s Facebook progress on AppData, our traffic tracking service for social games and developers.

View the original article here