Mark van Diggelen’s Casual Games Blog

SkillPod Media started with its mobile strategy sometime ago and has taken this time to finalise the games content and more so the new mobile games platform that’ll be launched and on offer to publishers from February. More recently SkillPod started with the deployment of its Flash Lite based mobile games into the Nokia Ovi Store, the games have been available for a couple of weeks now and includes 15 of the 40 titles available. The response really hasn’t been bad, says Mark van Diggelen, CEO of SkillPod Media, with some typical superstars enjoying downloads from 55 countries.

There is definitely a purchasing trend towards the handsets that have the Ovi Store links pre-installed on the handsets, such as the new Nokia N97 and 5800. SkillPod has also recently partnered with the new BuzzCity mobile portal Djuzz, which will also be launched in the next week or two as well as the ever popular Australasian mobile portal, Cellmania.com. We’ll add 4 to 5 new titles a month to the Ovi Store and our other mobile partners, adds van Diggelen.

The new mobile games platform will be a feature rich offering and will initially be launched as an internal mobile brand, offering a showcase of the solution and the available games titles. The new SkillPod Mobile Games Platform will allow users to register online or from their mobile handsets, users will have the ability to customise the interface from a selection of skins on offer, they’ll further be able to play the games through their handsets browser, log scores, challenge friends and enter the various tournaments on offer. Users will be able to purchase their favourite games for installation on their handsets, these games will feature local high score logging, for offline gaming fun. SkillPod launched its virtual currency system, Pods, almost 2 years ago whereby users earn and spend Pods when the play certain games, enter tournaments and challenge friends, the Pods system will also be introduced into the Mobile offering.

SkillPod will be launching a number of titles for the ever popular Apple iPhone and it’s baby sister the iPod Touch, titles will also be available for the Blackberry and Android handsets towards the 2nd quarter of 2010. The mobile platform will be made available to publishers as either a white labelled version or through our robust XML solutions, various revenue models are available for publishers to share in the sales of the mobile games.

SkillPod will be offering advertisers and publishers the option to customise, rebrand and/or translate the games for their mobile offerings, thus opening up additional revenue streams for partners.

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Adobe has launched its new over-the-air mobile runtime, Flash Lite 3.1 Distributable Player (beta). Adobe’s strategy is to enable developers to create and distribute applications for the phones and provide a better on-device experience. Windows Mobile and Nokia S60 are the first supported OS and Flash Lite 3.1 is automatically installed and updated while the games are downloaded.

New revenue streams are vital for internet based companies and products, and Adobe is providing an additional delivery system and a new monetization solution for content creators using flash based mobile applications. SkillPod Media was approached by, Thumplay.com and Zed, to provide games for this history making event and successfully supplied 31 games, for both the Windows and Nokia handsets. Chris Phenner executive vice president, business development at Thumbplay.com had this to say about the experience with SkillPod Media, “top honours go to the team at SkillPod for walking through walls to write the software and work through some of issues we encountered with the beta release”.

Thumbplay sell digital content to an audience of more than 230 million mobile customers in the United States”. “This is the type of event we’ve been working towards for the past 5 years, it just goes to show that a South African game developer, can play with the biggest and best around the globe”, says Mark van Diggelen, CEO of SkillPod Media. “We have an incredibly competent and passionate team of individuals working behind the scenes, ensuring that we’re in a position to offer globally competitive products and services, this launch is a culmination of a massive effort to enter the Mobile Flash Lite Games market with a bang,” he adds.

SkillPod Media focuses on the casual games market and has developed its own game management platform which runs the games sites of publishers scattered across the globe, version 5 of the platform will be launched in the next few weeks and has a host of new features and game titles on offer. We have focused heavily on the user experience in the new platform and the new game titles selection, the new “white label” platform is a quantum leap in terms of what’s on offer to publishers across the globe.

One of the in-house titles that’s being launched is SkillPod Media’s Morabaraba game:

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SkillPod Media’s new mobile games roll-out is continuing unabated as the year draws to a close. The company – already established as the leading South African provider of online casual and skill games to the local and international markets – is on the fast track to making a similar impact on the hugely popular mobile gaming market.

Mobile games for everyone, including iPhone users

With 25 Flash Lite games developed for mobile phones, SkillPod Media is already a fair way into the process of adapting its hugely popular online games suite for the mobile market. By January 2009 there will be 40 game titles available, across a number of game genres: Arcade and Sports games, Puzzles, Strategy games, free and fun Casino games and more. The planned game development schedule is to release 10 new titles per month from then on.

Development has also started on a range of games for the hugely popular Apple iPhone – a number of titles will be available by the time SkillPod Media launches its new mobile games platform in early February 2009.

Mark van Diggelen, CEO of SkillPod Media, is very pleased with the pace of development and the game uptake so far: “The response from the mobile community has been amazing,” he says, “with a number of South African mobile content aggregators showing a lot of interest. We’re also getting interest from as far afield as Singapore.”

Continued international success

The international interest is not surprising, given the success that the company has already enjoyed in international markets with its online games platform. It recently launched a games portal for Poland’s biggest social networking website, Gadu Gadu, and has made similar inroads into the Ukrainian (Russian) market.

“Our Polish and Russian gaming platforms now offer 130 fully translated games each, and they are proving to be wonderfully successful in both territories,” says van Diggelen.

Branding opportunities for 2010 FIFA World Cup

SkillPod.com has added over 60 new premium high score games to its gaming portal – these will soon be added to its partners’ games sites. Partners include some of biggest and most trafficked websites in the South African market, like IOL, Media24, News24.com, Kagiso Media’s brands and Ananzi.

This brings the total number of game titles on offer to over 350. Each game can be fully branded and customised to advertisers’ requirements. They include a range of customisable soccer games, specifically developed to allow companies and advertisers to brand them to tie in with the 2010 FIFA World Cup™.

A number of new multi-player games are also being tested, including backgammon and checkers. There will soon be another 10 new multi-player games to add to the existing poker and bingo games, which have become huge hits with players.

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