After being in private beta for the last three months, Playyoo is opening its doors for everyone this morning. The site is aimed at casual gamers who like playing games on their mobile phones. Like Kongregate, game developers can show off their wares and interact directly with the people playing them. Better yet, anyone without programming knowledge can use Playyoo's WYSIWYG game creator tool to create one of six game presets of simple games like pairs, tic tac toe, snake, and ping-pong. While the amount of customizations on these gaming presets is fairly limited, the titles uploaded by real game developers tend to have a little more depth. Developers with existing projects can simply port them over with a Playyoo-supplied template for Flash 8 Pro or CS3.
In terms of cost, if users find a game they like, they can download it to their mobile phones free of charge. The entire service is run by advertising, which shows up both on the site and on the games when you start them up.
What I really like about Playyoo is that it supplies each user with a customized "game stream" that can be tweaked similar to Facebook's newsfeed so that certain game genres show up more or less than others (get a peek at this after the jump). It makes it easy to discover new content as it comes in. Likewise, Playyoo users can send recommendations to one another if they come across something cool or worth playing.
Playyoo currently supports a pretty massive variety of phones. It's also nice enough to let you know how many games out of the entire library your phone can handle, along with providing a bandwidth limiter you can set to automatically cut you off of after burning through a set limit of data. While the graphics of the titles may not blow your socks off (like the upcoming Vollee service) you can't beat the price, and the potential for the game creator Web app is promising for folks like me with little to no coding skills.
More screens after the jump.
The game creator is WYSIWYG, and lets you pick out all sorts of color and texture combinations. If you want to make your game more difficult you can even ramp it up with a slider.
(Credit: CNET Networks)Wrapping up today's pitch sessions at the Under the Radar Mobility conference are four companies focusing on the platform, also known as "how to get things on your phone." It's one of the deepest levels of the mobile space, and also one of the most nebulous and hard to explain.
mPortico (whose name is not to be confused with a pizza place near CNET's San Francisco headquarters) creates the technology for branded memory cards people can stick in their mobile phones that has embedded games, applications, and video content. These cards end up on retail store shelves that anyone can buy and plug in without having to deal with navigating to Web sites or download huge files while on the go. To help save the content from being shared openly, the company has employed a proprietary DRM system.
To get cards to the shelves, mPortico has partnered with Kingston, Universal, and I-Play mobile gaming. Kingston actually makes the memory cards, while mPortico takes care of the rest.
The judges questioned mPortico's move toward solid state storage as a medium instead of going for Web downloads, which mPortico's CEO Shimon Constante noted as offering higher capacities for slower mobile networks while offering consumers a useful piece of storage they can use when they're done with it.
What sets Remotv apart from its competitors is its centralized server system that will take media from your home machine and serve it up to others without sucking up your bandwidth. One of the weaknesses about most other services that offer media sharing is if the machine with your content goes down or has too many people leeching, the system falls apart.
... Read more
- prev
- 1
- next
