For years, gaming portals were the only way to play games on the web, and several of those sites offered real-world prizing to entice users to keep playing. The portal game has continued to evolve onto Facebook, where companies like Mindjolt engage 16 million MAUs and EA’s Pogo attempts to find its own niche on the social network. Another player, Strategic Design Network, just launched a portal called GameToyz and they are betting on the fact that users will want to join up with them to get access to those real world prizes.
Like Mindjolt, GameToyz offers games in the typical categories including action and puzzle games. GameToyz also has their own virtual currency called ‘coins’ that players can earn by playing games. Coins can then be used to redeem prizes like American Express gift cards… This is a play out of Pogo’s playbook where players earn tokens for logging in and can redeem them on Pogo.com to try to win prizes.
Some games are developed in house as Strategic Design Networks’s focus is on creating ultimate gaming and social experiences for its players. SDN employs developers and designers in house to deploy games on multiple social networks and offering a superb ‘customer experience’ although its unclear what that exactly means. Other games seem to be part of a distribution network, such as Mochi Media’s. The general consensus on meta-games seems to be mixed – some seeing it as obfuscating the user experience while others are betting on its capabilities to drive user retention. GameToyz, like other meta-game designs, offers a leaderboard system in addition to its tournaments as well as achievements. Some of the games available to play are games we’ve seen, such as Armored Ashura which is a premium game on Mindjolt. The games fall under a variety of interesting categories including board games and dress-up games and have a standard quality found on most other flash gaming portals.
The company also acquired PayOutHub recently, a cash tournament platform that allows developers to monetize their applications. Founded by Sean Mehra, PayOutHub allows players to pool in cash to enter tournaments that would last for a certain number of time and be based on high scores. This similar functionality is offered within GameToyz to some degree within a section on their portal on Facebook.
As many casual gaming companies scramble to figure out how to leverage Facebook’s distribution, we should see a lot of innovation in this space.
