Social Game Tools for Publishers

By Jason Boog 

Should more publishers think about entering the competitive and lucrative world of social games? At the Inside Social Apps conference this week, Disney Interactive senior VP of social games John Spinale (pictured) explained how Disney entered the evolving space.

Here’s more from Spinale: “We started off making games for MySpace and it wasn’t obvious that Facebook would be THE social network and I don’t think they realized they’d be a games platform. Games drive usage and purchases and engagement. Apple came reluctantly to the games space and Facebook came accidentally. A lot of the user engagement and adoption of the platform is driven by gaming and now they’re beginning to stabilize their business around gaming.”

The company hired comic book writer Alex Irvine to develop Marvel: Avengers Alliance, the first Facebook game from Disney-owned Marvel Comics.

If you are interested in exploring the world of social games, we found five social game engines that can help publishers simplify the process of developing social games for online platforms. If you end up building any social game content, be sure to email GalleyCat your results.

Five Social Game Engines

Appainter: You use our engine to build out your own Facebook game.  Players on your game can use online payments to purchase in game items.  We show you how much you’ve sold and pay you directly via PayPal.

Roar Engine: “Roar Engine puts the power of an incredible social game mechanics platform into your hands, complete with management tools, payment processing, reporting systems. It gives you all that backend stuff you need to create a modern, compelling online game, which leaves you free to focus on creating awesome games.”

Papaya Mobile: “an open mobile social network for Android focused on casual gaming and virtual currency. Papaya offers developers a fast and easy way to reach millions of users worldwide and improve their return on investment for Android game development.”

Unity: “Unity 3 is a game development tool that has been designed to let you focus on creating amazing games.”

Fliso: “the industry-acknowledged highest performance engine for running isometric Flash games.”