Fans of free word games will now have a new home on the web thanks to the recently launched WordGameWorld.com. The new flash portal launched by developer Untold Entertainment will deal exclusively in word games, and promises to filter through every possible offering to make sure only quality games appear on the service.
Fans of free word games will now have a new home on the web thanks to the recently launched WordGameWorld.com. The new flash portal launched by developer Untold Entertainment will deal exclusively in word games, and promises to filter through every possible offering to make sure only quality games appear on the service.
“Typically, portal owners will just subscribe to the MochiMedia games feed, and each week they’ll get a fresh dump of content on their sites. This content is not usually screened or monitored, and the portal owners take everything as-is,” says Ryan Creighton, President of Untold Entertainment. “This means they’re taking good games along with bad…. it’s a slower process, but I’m hand-picking all of the games that go on WordGameWorld.com.”
Unlike many new ventures, the impetus behind launching World Game World wasn’t driven by profit, but by the desire to improve a potential product. The team at Untold is currently working on SpellCaster, an upcoming word game, and was looking for a way to learn more about what works in the genre and what doesn’t. “I’ll see from the ratings on the portal which games hit with the audience and which don’t, then I’ll use that info to inform my design decisions.”
The team was also desperate to discover a group of playtesters who were already firmly rooted in the genre, and saw launching a portal as an opportunity to find these people. When playtesting their previous release Interrupting Cow Trivia, they found that the feedback they were getting was nitpicky and less than helpful as it was being pulled from a group largely made up of other game developers, many of whom didn’t enjoy trivia games.
“I need to put SpellCaster in front of an audience of people who like word games. What a revolutionary idea! My theory – and I hope it’s sound – is that if I can grab an audience full of word game fans and I can get them playing and commenting on early SpellCaster tests, then when the game is finally released, those people may actually shell out money for the product. It’s crazy, I know. So how do I get that audience of word game players? I create a word game portal, that’s how.”
WordGameWorld.com is now live to the public, and is currently offering 42 games – though that number is sure to grow. To learn more about the story that brought Word Game World to life, read Ryan Creighton’s blog post at untoldentertainment.com.
