Companies in the social gaming space are looking to make social gaming ubiquitous as almost anything else in a player’s life. Part of the reason this will occur is due to the light-weight nature of these games and their accessibility on multiple-devices and platforms. One key area of target is browser-based gaming and the latest piece of news focusing on this frontier comes from Redmond, Washington based Spry Hive Industries who will be launching a realtime media browser with Heyzap integration.
Fizzik is currently in beta and allows users to navigate the social and real-time web as well as any social games they may be partaking in. The browser will be supporting Adobe Flash, creating opportunities for developers to distribute their games on this platform. Spry Hive Industries has also announced the addition of Heyzap’s online game service to version 0.30 that will increase the current inventory of 25,000 Adobe Flash games drastically.
“Fizzik is designed to make the Web more fun, and games are all about fun.” said Paul Scarpa, CEO and co-founder of Spry Hive. “But finding great games online can be hard, and too often game play is limited by Web page clutter. By integrating with Heyzap, we’ve made online games easier to find and enjoy.”
Games can be accessed at the click of the button, popping up in a wide-screen view. Although I haven’t had a chance to try out the beta version, I can assume that games will be highlighted and pushed to users using social and achievement related notifications compelling users to engage and eventually fork over money for virtual goods.
“Since the launch of our beta, folks have been telling us what they love about Fizzik, as well as what they miss about their old browsers” said Grant Blahaerath, CTO and co-founder. “By adapting some of those features to Fizzik’s online media approach we’ve made a big improvement in our customers’ Web experience.”
Heyzap has been quite active in forming partnerships. Similar to Mochi Games, Heyzap has a diverse collection of games from developers that can take their flash games and distribute them through Heyzap’s network of 150,000+ sites with social layers integrated. It’s other recent announcement is their integration with JB Casual Games, Hi5 and with Ning where Ning creators can add Heyzap pay-to-play games onto their networks. Creators will reportedly earn 10% of all revenue from premium game purchases. Heyzap’s casual gaming widget also connects with the Facebook API, making its offering very appealing. Close to 3,000 developers have signed up with Heyzap
Fizzik also supports tabbed browsing and makes navigating various media types simple. Users can also share games and achievements with friends using built-in email, Twitter and Facebook features. Content is automatically displayed in users’ Twitter updates and saved for republishing later. Fizzik isn’t just about social and casual games, however, and offers powerful search capabilities of Bing and Amazon, videos from YouTube and more.
It remains to be seen if Fizzik will open support directly for developers to monetize and distribute they way Chrome store will operate. Also it seems a bit limiting to just support flash. Why not also open support for Unity and attract other gamers? We’ve seen other social browsers like Flock that leverage Firefox engines and add social integrations to make it easy to discover and share content.
Will Fizzik make the internet more fun? It may but only for the users that install the browser as the company will struggle in user adoption. Their current user base is unknown. Fizzik is currently available as a free download and runs on most Windows operating systems (no mac support yet) and you can check out it here.
