Social Platform for Mobile Games

Extracted 01MAR2012 from http://venturebeat.com/2012/03/01/viximo-launches-social-zone-platform-for-mo...

Viximo, a platform for cross-platform social games, is broadening its distribution reach today with the launch of its Social Zone platform which helps make mobile apps more social.

The company is attacking the problem of discovery, which is more difficult on mobile platforms than it is on social networks. Mobile app makers have a hard time getting noticed on platforms with hundreds of thousands of rival apps. By making the mobile apps more social, Viximo hopes to help the apps spread more easily by word of mouth...

[Viximo CEO] Strang said that, in contrast to rivals such as Gree and DeNA/Ngmoco, Viximo will not put its branding on the social platform. Rather, it will allow the developers and publishers to put their own brands on it and also retain their direct relationship with the players.

“The other networks were made for downloadable games,” said Strang. “Ours is made for the freemium world. They have leaderboards and achievements. They’re monolithic platforms. Ours is designed to be purely social. You can add more features and customize it. The options for social mechanics are in the hands of developers.”

Within the offering is something that Viximo calls the Social Supergraph, which presents a unified social graph for a user from multiple social networks and mobile platforms, including the user’s own address book, Facebook, Twitter, and the numerous regional social networks that Viximo works with today. Those include Google+, Yahoo Games, Tuenti, VZnet, Gaia Online, Orkut, IMVU, Odnoklassniki, and Nasza Klasa.

Social Zone runs under the surface and integrates seamlessly with a game, rather than operating as a branded channel above the game, as with DeNA’s Mobage. It enables freemium games to be customized for various social options. Social Zone uses Viximo’s own real-time analytics to give developers insights into game usage.