MySpace Announces Winners of TheGame 08

The markets in Japan may be getting crushed right now, but one lucky developer will be celebrating with a $30,000 cash prize at the Tokyo Game Show. The application, which was ironically developed by a company called “Contests2Win.com”, is called youCharades and “is a Video Talent Platform where users can guess various titles acted out by their friends and fellow users.” Contests2Win.com appears to be a fairly large organization rather than a small developer.

Other finalists include Crazy Life, The Ninja Webcam Game, and SmartBaby!. According to the release, MySpace will translate the application into Korean, Japanese, and Chinese and promote it as a “Featured Application” for free, meaning they won’t have to pay $75,000 for one week of promotion.

For those of you looking to participate in the MySpace gaming competition domestically, tough luck! The company has yet to announce any plans to launch a similar competition here in the United States. The next interesting test for these applications will be user adoption. So far, SmartBaby! has attracted almost 17,000 active users, whereas the other applications have all attracted less than 1400.

Interestingly shoved into this press release was a quote from Mitch Liu, the co-founder and VP of Product at Offerpal Media (who is also a sponsor of this blog). Offerpal and other competing lead-generation ad networks have been highly successful with social games. It will be interesting to see if that trend continues.

Join Baratunde Thurston (left), The Onion’s Director of Digital and author of How to Be Black, for an entertaining look at creative social media campaigns in our Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting February 16. Other speakers include Morin Oluwole (Facebook), Tim Devane (bitly), and SocialTimes' writer Devon Glenn.   Register now.