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The9 Invests in AuroraFeint

 The Chinese Gaming company The9 has invested in AuroraFeint - makers of the OpenFeint platform to bring OpenFeint to China & Android. Very exciting times for Jason & the team. I first got involved with OpenFeint as and advisor last year after I left Facebook & have been very impressed by the speed Jason Citron & his team have executed on their vision under the guiding star of Peter Relan, founder of YouWeb who incubated the company. OpenFeint has over 2,200 live games for the iPhone, and will soon have publishers such as Astraware, Digital Chocolate, Glu Mobile, Hudson Soft and others onboard. With both Chinese and Japanese investors onboard (the Japanese gaming giant DeNA invested in the company last year) AuroraFeint is set up for a strong future presence  in Asia. Very excited to see how the how the story unfolds. 

Disclaimer: I'm a former advisor & a small shareholder in AuroraFeint.

CrowdStar's Happy Aquarium & Happy Pets

Big congratulations to the CrowdStar team on the successfully launch of Happy Pets, yet another great social game on Facebook. In just a week Happy Pets went from 0 to 890,000 Monthly active users. Amazing.  Following Happy Aquarium's tremendous success not long ago, this is just shows that it wasn't a one off only. Keep a close eye on these guys - they are going to go far. Social gaming have just started to take off, and it is definitely not the-winner-takes-it-all market. There is plenty of room for new companies in this space. The key thing for all social games though, is to convert active users to active paying users. My advice: focus on optimizing mobile payments to a more salient place in the UI. 

Disclaimer: I sit on CrowdStar's advisory board.

Digital Chocolate To Use OpenFeint

Digital Chocolate, one of the most frequent publishers of iphone games is going to use OpenFeint for scoreboards and achievements. This is a huge win for OpenFeint, that already has more than 3 million active users on its platform and more than 200 games in the app store. I have covered OpenFeint several times before here . Also check out the interview Jason Citron, Peter Relan & I gave to TUAW some time ago. If you are an iphone game developer integrate OpenFeint immediately! You won't regret it. Follow: OpenFeint on Twitter for more frequent updates. 

Disclaimer: I'm on their advisory board.

OpenFeint Launches 2.0 - Social Community platform

I'm going to be at Casual Connect (June 21-22) next week in Seattle on behalf of Aurora Feint / OpenFeint. Let me know if you want to meet up and learn how OpenFeint can make your games more social and how you can cross-promote your games on the OpenFeint platform.

Oh BTW, OpenFeint just announced the OpenFeint 2.0 social community platform for mobile games :

OpenFeint Social Discovery

OpenFeint Social Discovery supports multiple approaches to discovering games and game content in the App Store

Discovery Lobbies: Chat with other people from any OpenFeint enabled game and discover what they are playing. See the name of the game every player is chatting from alongside each and every message. Clicking on the game's name or icon will take you its iPurchase Catalog where you can click Buy Now to go directly to the app store and purchase the game.  

What are my friends playing:

Clicking on a person in the friends tab shows you a list of all the OpenFeint games they have played. Clicking on any of those games will take you to its iPurchase Catalog page from where you can click Buy Now to go directly to the app store and purchase the game.

Social Challenges: Send a challenge to your friends including those even playing a different game! Your friend will receive the challenge when opening any OpenFeint enabled title. From there, they can see click to the challenge information and are given the option to purchase your game from iPurchase if they don't already own it.

Joined Aurora Feint Advisory Board

I am very excited to announce that I recently joined AuroraFeint's Advisory Board. Aurora Feint is the company behind the tremendously popular Massive Multiplayer iPhone game, Aurora Feint and more importantly, behind OpenFeint the Social Gaming Platform for the iPhone that recently announced OpenFeint 2.0 in connection with the WWDC covered by Techcrunch.

I'm very impressed by how the two creators of AuroraFeint, Daniella Cassley and Jason Citron managed to develop such a great game and then move to a social gaming platform in no-time signing up popular titles like: Pocket God, SticksWars, MyBrute, Knights On Rush, iDracula, EpicPetWars, Ankagua3D, KnowitAll, Optime 4 in a row, Sneezies and many more. Over 3 million users have now joined the OpenFeint social community.

What is then OpenFeint 2.0 and why should you care? Well, if you're an iphone game developer you have probably realized how increasingly difficult it has become to be discovered in the iphone app store. Just as social discovery through friends and people you care about drove the usage and engagement of applications on Facebook, it's going to become very important for games on the iPhone. Through social discovery, your friends become the filter for what is relevant and important to you in a sea of clutter. People are more likely to download applications and play games if they discover that their friends are using them.

OpenFeint 2.0 is really all about answering the question What Are My Friend's Playing?'
in a myriad of ways. The developers of Aurora Feint has taken every
piece of OpenFeint and injected a healthy dose of Friends into it.
Every page you look at, from a game's iPromote page to your
achievements list, has social context.

iPhone games that have integrated OpenFeint have seen a significant boost in sales as a result of the social discovery features embedded in the platform. The developers I met with are very excited about OpenFeint 2.0 and what an impact it will have on their games in terms of user-engagement and the fact that you don't have to worry about developing leaderboards, achievements, profiles, chat rooms and friends list imported from social networks. The best of all is that it only takes around 30 minutes to integrate.

Since I had the privilige to work on Facebook Connect related stuff while at Facebook before it was rolled out in the open, I am very excited to see that through OpenFeint 2.0 game developers get full Facebook Connect integration as well as Twitter and MySpace integration - winn!

So if you're an iphone developer that want to provide your game with some powerful social plumbing and boost your sales don't hesitate go here now: OpenFeint and if you want to get in touch with the team at AuroraFeint - feel free to reach out to me directly.

Click here to get OpenFeint now.

The Psychology of Immersion - Virtual Reality Is Reality

A recent article in Wall Street Journal talks about virtual relationships and their affect on real relationships. According to a recent study cited we can learn the following about the cognitive processes in players brains:

• On a neurological level, players may not distinguish between virtual and real-life relationships
• People socializing in virtual worlds remain sensitive to subtle cues like eye contact - in one study, participants moved their avatars back if another character stood too close, even though the space violation was just virtual
• Our brains are not specialized for 21st-century media - There is not switch that says "Process this different because it is on the screen".

More discussion at the MIT Advertising Lab and Neuromarketing

Frets On Fire - Open Source Guitar Hero

This is just awesome! Frets on Fire is a game about musical skill and fast fingers. The aim of the game is to play guitar with the keyboard as accurately as possible. It's an open-source project with hundreds of songs composed by the community and supports multi platform. In short it is open source guitar hero! How cool is that!

Features: 

• Unique inverted keyboard gameplay style
• Song editor  form making your own tunes
• Compete iwth others on the World Charts
• Supports importing Guitar Hero I-II songs
• Multiplatform
• Open source

Technorati Tags: fretsonfire, games, opensource, guitar hero, music

Frenzoo- Second Life in Hong Kong

I told you and showed you about HiPiHi - China's Second Life. Hold the fort! Here comes Frenzoo - Second Life for teenage girls in Hong Kong..According to Brand Republic "Frenzoo, an Asia-centric 3D virtual world aimed at teenage girls, will soon come out of stealth mode to connect consumers in a Second Life-like experience.".Via Angus.

Technorati Tags: Frenzoo, HiPiHi, Virtual Worlds, Hong Kong, Second Life, SL

Advertising On Loading Screens - New Oppertunity

Have you ever wondered why there are is no advertising on loading screens of Flash-heavy sites? So does Adverlab , and they really raised a good point. I actually tend to skip Flash-based sites if they don't load at once, and I dont think I am alone. Taking advantage of the loading time is actually a very good idea for either advertising or information snippets.

Virtual Worlds, Games and Avatars

Susan participated in an Avatar panel at SXSW in Austin and shared some of her notes with us on Avartars, Virtual worlds and Gaming. She also points to a very interesting academic study on Game Studies (download).

Main points:

1. Games need more laughter in the slaughter
2. Players want to help other players do well in the game even when the game is competitive
3. Games need non-white characters who are not gangsters or criminals.
4. Gamers are less social than you think they are, less social than even THEY think they are
5. How do players learn to play? If it looks like a sniper, it should act like a sniper
6. Gestural interfaces that make sense, make sense for specific reasons.
7. You can quantify which factors matter most in immersive game design.
8. There are multiple ways to approach realism
9. There is such a thing as ethical videogame design
10. Death matters..