Today, MySpace announced a revamped games homepage, available at www.myspace.com/games, which helps users discover and share games virally. The new Games section also improves application engagement and analytics tools for game developers. In addition, MySpace introduced the “MySpace Neon iPhone” application that gives users access to their MySpace games on the iPhone.
According to MySpace, “nearly a third of MySpace users engage daily in games and there are more than 28 million active app users on the site”. The site is attempting to focus on games as its primary source of entertainment, just as they have for music in the past. Reading the blog post announcing the new upgrade, we can see that in addition to the release, there are nine social games were released as well. The games are not developed by MySpace, but seem to be highlighted to identify that developers are still creating unique experiences on the platform. Although it hasn’t been stated as such, with the recent shakeup of management at MySpace, I wouldn’t be surprised if they are now dedicating a significant portion of resources to developing the games section of the site. I wonder (complete speculation) if they may consider making games themselves.
By playing some of their newly announced games, we can see that the quality is as high as any of the successful titles on Facebook, and a user who has a social graph on MySpace would certainly not leave the site for the lack of quality games available. The new games section does look conspicuously like the Facebook Games dashboard as well, but I guess imitation is the most sincere form of flattery and it is a smart move because the new MySpace games area is simple and easy to navigate.
There isn’t much information on the Neon application just yet, so we’ll see where MySpace is headed with this as more news develops.
