Enrique Iglesias, Play With It! Paves Way For Social Music Gaming Platform

Enrique Iglesias, Play With It! is a music-based app designed to allow the singer's fans to play with music in a social gaming context that was created by developer MXP4's Bopler Games platform, which Inside Facebook explored last month. The branded celebrity game entered an alpha state on Facebook in late January of this year before hitting on open beta around April 28. Since then, we've seen it climb into our our weekly list of emerging Facebook games. Enrique Iglesias, Play With It! currently enjoys 220,453 monthly active users and 13,560 daily active users according to our traffic tracking service, AppData. Enrique Iglesias, Play With It! is an app of several parts, with the main game component being "Pump It," a simple rhythm game requiring players to move their mouse around a circular diagram in time with colored lights. The other parts of the app allow players to "play with" the music and create their own simple remixes. The app packs a lot of different things to do into one place. Albin Serviant, CEO of MXP4, believes that it's fulfilling an important place in the Facebook app market. "There is a giant disconnect between social gaming and music at the moment," he says. "On the top 100 social game apps on Facebook, there is nothing related to music except the excellent NightClub City. [This is] mainly focused on club management and not too much on really playing with the music, in a gaming context, on Facebook." Serviant was also intrigued to see Zynga's recent deal with Lady Gaga but believes that artist-specific apps such as Enrique Iglesias, Play With It! as well as the company's more fleshed-out Bopler Games social music gaming platform will play an important role in helping the music industry break into the social game space. "Music is not core to [Zynga's] particular gaming experiences," says Serviant. "We are focused on making music core to the gaming experience with the beta launch of Bopler Games, the first social music game on Facebook. Music and games are very popular on Facebook, but music has not been monetized as successfully as games have. We feel that our approach of making music the center of the social gaming experience and allowing the music to be monetized in the game with Facebook Credits is the best approach right now." The Enrique Iglesias app, in many ways, is a testing ground for the technologies that MXP4 is incorporating into its Bopler Games, Play With Hits! standalone app. The original idea was to create a new revenue stream for musicians where the app pays them royalties whenever players spend $1 in Facebook Credits to play with the full version of a song instead of a 60-second preview. Enrique Iglesias, Play With It! doesn't feature any explicit in-game monetization for players to spend Credits, however, so the actual monetization appears to be completely within the ads for Iglesias' current album and single as well as a "VIP Experience" at his live shows. The Bopler Games, Play With Hits! app, meanwhile, features a full suite of typical social game monetization features, including virtual goods and boosts, many of which can be purchased by earning enough in-game currency or, for those who wish to save time, using Facebook Credits. Looking forward, Serviant says that the team is developing a software development kit for the Bopler Games platform so that a "range of artists and game developers can easily develop and monetize their own social music games, as Enrique Iglesias did." You can follow the progress of both Enrique Iglesias, Play With It! and the Bopler Games standalone app with AppData, our traffic tracking service for social games and developers.

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Enrique Iglesias, Play With It! Paves Way For Social Music Gaming Platform

Pete Davison

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