Today, GameHouse, a division of RealNetworks unveiled a social gaming platform called GameHouse Fusion. The platform allows gamers to access thousands of games spread across various websites and devices. The current GameHouse network has over 50 million players per month, and those players will now be accessible to developers who create games on the platform. The platform is fully featured, and gives developers the tools to easily add multiplayer gameplay, live chat, virtual economy and community features like high scores and news feeds. This is similar to services offered by HeyZap and J2Play.
To kick off the platform, GameHouse has released a Facebook Application called GameHouse that has 1000 playable games and acts as a portal for players to access all the avialable games that are available. It’s free, and will likely include more features as time passes, but for now seems to be more of a directory without the social features. The game selection is great, and has notable inclusions from PopCap Games.
“GameHouse Fusion is truly a game changing platform, providing consumers access to thousands of great games and a community of millions of other players. It offers our developer partners the opportunity to make all games social — even those not originally designed for social interaction — on virtually any screen,” said John Barbour, president of GameHouse. “With the unmatched set of multi-platform development and distribution assets we have built over time, GameHouse is leading the transformation of digital games to mainstream social entertainment for the masses.”
GameHouse Fusion attempts to introduce unique user created content, allowing players to create competitions and prizes and send detailed recommendations to friends. The idea is that gamers are able to create their own experiences as they play the games, and it is made all the more attractive because of the advanced features like multiplayer servers and games. The mobile integration will come along in the third quarter of this year and onwards, and will include Brew, iPhone, Android and other mobile phones. The fact that GHF is supporting older phones means the SDK will likely be data driven, allowing quick mobile games to easily post scores through their data connection, even if the phone isn’t a fully featured smartphone.
Check out GameHouse at http://apps.facebook.com/gamehouse/.
