There is a new casual gaming network in town that’s got some serious cross-platform chops. Don’t be fooled by the cutesy graphics. Today, Mytopia is simultaneously launching across Facebook, Bebo, MySpace (currently pending approval) and its own Website with eight games (Chess, Backgammon, Sudoku, Dominoes, Bingo, Spades, Hearts, Video Poker). On Monday, it will release the same games across the major Web and desktop widgets: iGoogle Gadgets, Apple Dashboard Widgets, Yahoo Widgets and Windows Vista Toolbar Widgets. Here’s the thing: the games work across all of these platforms. You can be on Facebook playing cards with one friend on MySpace and another on Bebo. And you can control what people on each network see about you. For instance, you can present your real profile to your friends on Facebook, and a different Mytopia avatar to everyone else. These are the sort of apps that could one day break Facebook’s, or any social network’s, hold on its members. Mytopia was founded by a young Israeli American, Guy Ben-Artzi, and his sister Galia Ben-Artzi. They grew up in Silicon Valley, but now split their time between the U.S. and Israel. Nearly all the company’s engineers are in Israel. Guy wants to bring the computing architecture and game-play behind massively multiplayer online (MMO) games like World of Warcraft to casual games with broader appeal. Guy explains: What we have done over the past year is look at all the massive multiplayers and tried to analyze what makes those sticky and social. What is great about all of these massive multiplayers is you have people playing in guilds and trading with each other. We are building the MMO backend minus the 3D perspective and hard core genre. Mytopia games include the ability to join teams, compete in matches, send in-game messages, win points for different skill levels, collect virtual currency and trade in-game items with other players. The company plans to explore different ways to make money including in-game sponsorships, premium subscriptions, and micro-transactions linked to game items and the in-game economy. In May, the startup plans to open up its casual gaming platform to other developers. By delivering this write-once, deploy-anywhere capability, it hopes to challenge other social gaming networks with platform ambitions such as Zynga and SGN. This should be fun to watch. CrunchBase Information Mytopia Social Gaming Network Zynga Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
(Update: SGN raised $15 million on May 13, 2008). It was only last week that the Social Gaming Network (SGN) and Zynga announced their respective developer platforms for games on Facebook and other social networks. I said the game is on between these two companies to win the hearts and minds of social gaming developers. The folks at Zynga took exception to this characterization. If you put all of its games together, Zynga is the 10th largest app company on Facebook as measured by number of installs. SGN is No. 51. Venture capitalist and Zynga investor Fred Wilson accused me of not doing my homework in a post that set off a minor debate over the holiday weekend. After I commented on his post that the jury is still out on which of these young companies will succeed, Wilson responded: Its not even debateable who is a real company and who is not. Zynga CEO Mark Pincus also clearly feels that the comparison is not warranted. He told me of SGN: It is just a thorn in my side. It is some bad ex-girlfriend who will not leave me alone. I think we are very clearly the leader in the space. That thorn is about to get pricklier. Sources outside of SGN confirm that the company is about to raise as much as $10 million in a venture round. Multiple term sheets are on the table. None have yet been signed as the company studies its options. Says one competing VC who has done his due diligence and is eager to lead SGN’s round: When all is said and done they will have as big a network as Zynga. Fred Wilson doesn’t understand what is going on. Sounds like a debate to me. If size is the determinant of a “real company” (which I don’t think it is), then SGN’s platform is already a whole lot bigger than just a week ago. In less than a week it has signed 10 Facebook games to its budding social gaming hub, including Jetman—one of the most popular games on Facebook—Pirates, and The Dot Game. It has also signed Free Gifts, a virtual gift-giving application on Facebook that includes the other seven of the ten games. All told, the new apps will triple SGN’s daily active users from 200,000 to more than 600,000 on Facebook alone, bringing it substantially closer to Zynga’s 900,000. → Read More
Fred Wilson lit a fire today suggesting that certain bloggers need to step it up a notch to improve quality and be more like mainstream journalists. A fair point if spoken generally, although I’d argue that the quality of reporting done by many bloggers today, at least in the tech space, is equal to or better than most mainstream journalism. I think this is particularly true when we’re talking about breaking, non-embargoed news, where contacts and inside sources matter more than having all the time in the world to think about, research, write and edit an article. His point, therefore, should have been that all news writers need to step it up a notch and aim for better quality, which is sort of like saying nothing at all. Normally I wouldn’t take issue with the statement, except that it was partially aimed at us. Wilson specifically called out our Erick Schonfeld for his post on social gaming platforms, as well as Matt Marshall at VentureBeat for a post he wrote about Like. Wilson’s first gripe is that Matt, in his post about Like, didn’t give enough credit to competitor ThisNext. His second – that Erick, in his post on Zynga and SGN, suggested that the “two companies are neck and neck like Hillary and Obama,” when “Zynga is almost an order of magnitude bigger.” Wilson fully discloses his conflicts of interest in the post – that he is a friend to the founder of ThisNext and an investor in Zynga. At that point, of course, a lot of the credibility behind his opinions comes into question. The two bloggers he is attacking have no conflicts with these startups. He fails to realize that both Matt (San Jose Mercury News) and Erick (Fortune, Business 2.0) are seasoned mainstream journalists who’ve made the crossover to blogging. So his whole argument about blogging v. mainstream media loses yet more steam. In reading the articles, it seems to me that Matt did an excellent job of highlighting a recent surge by Like while still noting relevant competitors. Erick’s post, which I am more familiar with, is in my opinion above reproach. Erick notes the strengths and weaknesses of both platforms and suggests that developers will ultimately make a decision as to which, or both, they will join. Erick also interviewed Wilson for the post and quoted him in it. So what this really comes → Read More
The social networking game is all about scale. There are so many apps now on Facebook alone, nearly 16,000, that it is nearly impossible to get noticed unless you are already part of one of the bigger app companies. Cross promotion between apps is the key. Some of the largest app companies like Slide or RockYou, for instance, typically charge 50 cents per install to distribute apps from smaller developers across their users. But now we are beginning to see networks starting to form across specific application genres. In the social gaming category alone, a battle is brewing between the Social Gaming Network (SGN) and Zynga. Tomorrow, both will launch separate developer platforms for other gaming applications. (Info here for SGN developers, here for Zynga developers). The appeal to smaller social game developers is similar: join one of the gaming networks and see your game promoted on the toolbar or gaming page when people are playing other games in the network. Fred Wilson, the partner at Union Square Ventures, who invested in Zynga, explains to me: It is the exact same value proposition why you would want to build your app on Facebook as opposed to the Web. You can rapidly develop an audience. It is access to audience and monetization. Both companies have varying claims as to how large their audiences actually are. SGN CEO Shervin Pishevar says, “We are able to promote the developers’ games across millions of users and 700 million pageviews a month.” SGN’s most popular games on Facebook and its own site are Warbook, Street Race, and Fight Club. Zynga, for its part claims 1.3 million daily active users across Facebook, Bebo, Meebo, and Friendster. It’s most popular game is Texas Hold’Em poker (with 609,000 daily active users in Facebook alone), followed by Blackjack, Attack!, Scramble, and Sea Wars. At least on Facebook, it appears that Zynga has more daily active users. (See Zynga Facebook stats here and SGN Facebook stats here). Zynga, I have learned, has also recently acquired two smaller gaming developers: one is behind the CLZ group of apps, which have 365,000 daily active users, and the developers behind the Superheros app (34,000 daily active users). The company is also trying to avoid the as-yet-unresolved fate of Scrabulous, a Facebook game that is being threatened to be shut down because it is a copy of Scrabble. Zynga recently renamed one of its → Read More
The saga of Scrabulous is nearing an end. The Facebook version of Scrabble raised the ire of Hasbro and Mattel, which jointly own the rights to the game abroad and in the U.S., respectively. They have already asked Facebook to pull Scrabulous, one of the most popular apps on the social networking site. So why is Scrabulous still up on Facebook? A flurry of behind the scenes deal-making has been going on between Hasbro, Scrabulous, and Electronic Arts, which has the license in the U.S. to the online version of the game. Hasbro is trying to get Scrabulous to sell itself for a song to Electronic Arts, or else shut down completely by the end of the day today. Scrabulous has been trying to shop itself to other buyers as well, but its legal liability is scaring away any potential white knights. Unless it gets some sort of reprieve or agrees to sell to Electronic Arts, Scrabulous will be no more, despite the more than 46,000 Facebook members who have joined the “Save Scrabulous” group. What choice does it have, really, but to sell? And it might not end at Scrabulous. One industry source tells me that Hasbro is going after other knock-off games as well, and sending cease-and-desist letters to Facebook along with the infringing app developers, since it is the one hosting the games. So who might be next? Zynga, for one. The Mark Pincus startup that just publicly launched earlier this month—with $10 Million from Union Square Ventures, Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, Bob Pittman, and others—has games that are based on Risk (Attack!), Boggle (Scramble), and Battleship (Battleship). Zynga claims on its Website to have 1.4 million players of Attack!, 293,000 players of Battleship, and 257,000 players of Scramble. Battleship, Boggle, and Risk are all owned by Hasbro. If Mark Pincus has not already received a cease-and-desist letter, he will soon. Social networks have been a boon for casual online gaming, because now it is easy to find someone you actually know to play with. But a safer strategy than knocking off traditional board games without licensing them first is to actually create original games. That is the tack the Social Gaming Network (SGN) is taking. It’s popular Facebook games include WarBook and Fight Club. Collectively, its games are generating more than half-a-billion page views a month. There is a business in there somewhere. SGN, which is → Read More
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