RealNetworks’ GameHouse division is launching a social gaming platform to drawn more people into its games as well as those of its partners. It’s akin to bolting Facebook’s social network onto online games on any site or mobile phone.
The GameHouse Fusion platform will bring together social, online, download, and mobile game play, making it easy for consumers to share games with friends or discover new kinds of games that their friends like. In that sense, it’s like layering the functions of Facebook onto games, regardless of whether they are on Facebook or not.
The GameHouse network will be able to reach 50 million players a month on a variety of platforms, including the game portals on sites such as Comcast or social games on MySpace. Players on those sites will get access to thousands of socially-connected games.
“The social game space is exploding, but it’s exploding in silos,” said Matt Hulett, chief revenue officer at RealNetworks’ GameHouse division. “The different experiences on different platforms don’t talk to each other. The social network games don’t link to the same games on the web or mobile phones.”
For example, Hulett said that he could play a game and share his high score with a friend. That friend could notify Hewitt on his phone when he or she has beaten that high score.
RealNetworks’ partners will be able to benefit from the platform because it can increase engagement with games. As Facebook has discovered, you’re more likely to stick with a game for a longer time if you have friends playing it. GameHouse’s Fusion will have a centralized virtual economy with virtual currency that players can use to buy virtual goods. It will also have community features such as high scores, trophies, notifications and news feeds.
Developers using the platform will thus have ways to implement various business models, including virtual goods micro-transactions, in-game advertising, sponsorships, and licensing programs. They can also get access to deep analytics that reveal how a game is doing across platforms.
The Fusion platform will likely be useful for developers who don’t want the hassle of adding their own proprietary features to make their games more social. The first application to use GameHouse Fusion is GameHouse for Facebook, which lets players access more than 1,000 games from a single Facebook app. Craig Robinson, vice president of product marketing at GameHouse, said that in this case, Facebook would be akin to a shopping mall and GameHouse for Facebook would be like a store within it. Since GameHouse is putting a layer between Facebook and game companies, it will be interesting to see what Facebook’s reaction is. Other social network apps will be coming with the GameHouse Fusion technology in the coming months.
It’s a big endeavor, and one that others are doing as well. Digital Chocolate has created its own cross-game social platform on Facebook, and Big Fish Games also recently released a portal on Facebook.
RealNetworks said that GameHouse Fusion is built to scale to hundreds of millions of players. GameHouse will be releasing software development kits for implementing the platform on the iPhone, Android phones, other mobile phones, and internet-connected TVs later this year.
Partners include Comcast, Myspace, QualComm, Mattel, and PopCap Games. Rivals include Facebook itself, as well as virtual currency firms such as PlaySpan and Jambool, which operates Social Gold. As a platform, the Fusion technology works hand-in-hand with RealNetworks’ Emerge platform, which lets game developers publish games on any platform. Hulett said that Fusion and Emerge will be tied together via a software development kit in the coming months.