Mytopia started as an online games company. But that business is now a sideshow. The company’s real business will now revolve around its technology for making software applications, including but not limited to games, run on a wide variety of platforms.
Mytopia has a casual online game world with a million registered users, about 250,000 of whom visit the site each month. But the games on that platform are really a way to prove the company’s ability to take content and put it on multiple platforms, including computers and cell phones.
Today, the company said it will make eight of its games, such as poker, available on Windows Mobile smartphones. The games are already available via PC-based platforms including Facebook, Hi5, Bebo and MySpace, and the Mytopia site.
Guy Ben-Artzi, chief executive of the company, said that players in the Mytopia online world on the PC can now play the same games on Windows Mobile phones. They can actually use their phones to join a game full of PC players and have the same experience.
Those games have generated revenue for the company while it was waiting for the right business plan, but the games are likely to be the last that Mytopia makes as it transitions to focus on its platform technology, which it can monetize in a variety of ways. There are already huge rivals in casual games, from Mini-Clip to BigFish Games. Ben-Artzi thinks that the platform technology will be more successful in tough economic times.
The company may find an outside developer to build games for the Mytopia site, Ben-Artzi said. But the real-time universal gaming system, dubbed RUGS, will be the company’s main focus in the future. RUGS allows developers to code connected applications one time and simultaneously deploy them to every supported platform, including iPhone, Windows Mobile, BlackBerry, Symbian, Android, Palm and J2ME devices, as well as popular web platforms like Facebook’s F8 and Google’s Open Social.
“We are becoming a platform to shift content to run on all platforms,” Ben-Artzi said. “We are talking to partners in a variety of industries. Games were a great place to start because they are very demanding applications. We built a platform that made us see a bigger picture.”
Yahoo has a similar technology, dubbed Blueprint, that allows content to be viewed on a variety of phones, regardless of manufacturer. But it doesn’t work for the most demanding or complex applications.
Mytopia is based in San Francisco and has 24 employees, with most of the development in Israel. It was founded in 2007 by Ben-Artzi and his sister Galia Ben-Artzi and has raised money from angels, but Ben-Artzi said the company is not seeking cash at the moment.