Oberon Media has announced that it will be adding social features to its casual games on a variety of platforms including the PC. Oberon Media is the parent company of I-play, publisher of several successful casual game franchises including Dream Day Wedding, Women’s Murder Club and Agatha Christie.
Oberon Media has announced that it will be adding social features to its casual games on a variety of platforms including the PC. Oberon Media is the parent company of I-play, publisher of several successful casual game franchises including Dream Day Wedding, Women’s Murder Club and Agatha Christie.
The enhanced social features will allow players to use Facebook Connect to link their social networks in order to do things like see friends who are also playing the game, suggest the game to others, and share in-game achievements. The first two games to take advantage of the new social features are City Sights: Hello Seattle and Paradise Quest, both of which are published by I-play.
“As games’ connectivity to social graphs expands through APIs like Facebook Connect it becomes evident how powerful this functionality is to enhance the gaming experience,” said Tony Leamer, VP of Marketing for I-play, in a prepared statement. “We believe games on all platforms and for all audiences will eventually leverage social components.”
Following this initial release of these two socially-enhanced games, Oberon Media said it plans to roll out its new Social SDK to its Game Center developer partners in the next quarter.
In an interview with VentureBeat, Oberon Media’s Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer Ofer Leidner said that the Social SDK was more than a pure wrapper (for adding social features to existing games), but something that game companies will also be able to use to create social games from scratch.
“Oberon’s massive footprint of users, games and platform presence represents a tremendous opportunity to leverage social graphs integration on a large scale,” said Leidner. “This can be done through enabling a large number of existing games to become more social across many platforms or through creating games designed around the social graph from the start, but optimized for platforms outside of Facebook.com.”
