Hive Media is launching a new social game today as a way to show off a platform that it wants brands and other game makers to use.
The company is announcing My Hollywood Studio, a game where players start as film students and try to become movie moguls. It’s a new, Web-based take on Peter Molyneux’s PC game from 2004, The Movies. Players will be able to publish their achievements in the game to their Facebook news feeds. (That feature’s not live yet.)
There’s already a lot of competition among social-game platforms, with RealNetworks GameHouse and Offerpal Media. But others aren’t so focused on catering to big, established brands.
The game uses Hive Media’s Collaborative Content Delivery Platform, a Web-based tool that makes it easier to bring a Web-connected social game to market. It’s essentially a template that game makers can use to upload video, graphics, text and other material to create many different kinds of games: role-playing, location-based, or avatar-based. Those games can be published across a variety of social networks.
Hive Media’s first announced partnership is with Transformers producer Michael Bay’s The Institute. More deals are in the works with game, movie and TV studios. Games are naturally engaging for fans, so Hive Media hopes to use them to create deeper loyalty and awareness for brands, a category known as advergaming which has been around for a while.
The Santa Monica, Calif.-based company has 13 employees and was founded last year by Brian Laing, co-founder of RedSeal Systems and Blade Software. It competes with other brand-focused social game companies such as LOLApps and Merscom. The latter was recently acquired by Playdom. Hive Media received a seed round of funding last November and is hiring.