MySpace Launches Gaming Experience

In order to stop the bleeding of consumers to the rival Facebook social networking site, MySpace has got into the gaming arena.

MySpace today announced a new MySpace Games experience that creates a more social gaming environment with new tools and functionality for users and developers.

“Nearly one-third of MySpace users engage daily with games. We believe the new experience will empower even more of the MySpace audience to discover, share, and showcase games, which along with music and movies, are core to our content strategy,” said Mike Jones, MySpace Co-President. “We’ve been working with our developer partners to understand where they’d like to see MySpace go; based on that feedback we started rebuilding MySpace Games. These are the first steps in offering robust tools for developers to help their businesses thrive.”

The new MySpace Games Gallery now makes it easy for users to stay up to date on their games through Notifications, and discover new games through their friends’ Stream, personalised game recommendations, and popular game charts. Users will also be able to rate games, which enhance search results and recommendations.

MySpace provides a platform that is simple for independent game developers, while giving robust support for premium games from major development houses resulting in more gaming choices.

For developers, the new experience is a step to improve application engagement as games will be merchandised in more areas, games can be shared more easily by users, and deeper analytics tools provide more insight into how games are being used and by which demographics.

MySpace Platform developers are now able to:

• Review application-specific analytics via a new API, including invitation conversions, active users, notification responses and demographics.

• Build games in rich, 3D-like quality with Unity’s powerful 3D engine and allow MySpace users to access the games with a new plug-in. For example, Paradise Paintball utilizes this technology.

• Encourage cross-platform competition with Scoreloop, which allows games on different platforms to share the same high scores, achievements, challenges and buddy lists.

• Utilize GroovyCortex, which is a cloud-based solution for onsite application developers, to provide low latency push data for multiplayer games.

• Track the source of application invitations and utilization to learn how users are finding and choosing specific games.