Real Network’s GameHouse online gaming division is playing its social cards en route to being spun off by its parent by the end of this year.
GameHouse has announced a Facebook-based social gaming service at this week’s Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco and plans to release other social gaming applications in the coming months.
GameHouse, formerly known as RealArcade, has been more associated with casual PC gaming, but it needs to get into the biggest growth area of social gaming if it is to increase its appeal or make an impression as a stand-alone company.
It is adopting a platform strategy called GameHouse Fusion to spread its influence, aimed at giving game developers access to the 50m players a month it attracts to its own site, mobile phones and services it provides to customers such as Comcast.
Using its software developer kit, game designers can publish their game once and have it distributed to PC gaming portals and the major social-networking sites. Social gaming features such as leaderboards and the ability to play with friends across networks and devices will be built in.
Further SDKs coming later this year will provide access to the iPhone, Android devices, phones running Qualcomm’s Brew software and internet-connected televisions.
While Facebook is by far the biggest social gaming platfrom, with more than 400m members, GameHouse is aiming to cover more web territory with its strategy and range of partners. Fusion will also provide partners with ways of generating revenues including sponsored trophies, virtual goods and other micro-transactions.
GameHouse on Facebook starts with around 1,000 existing games, such as Uno, with games built specifically for the platform being rolled out in the coming months.
