Betting on the social web
We look at social sites as being a piece of the puzzle to the 'new web operating system', or ... the social web. Something that could potentially enable markets to reconfigure their business based on social concepts, relationships and a unified identity.
Related to the games business, the question we asked is whether a new model following social concepts can emerge instead of recreating the traditional big publisher / small developer model? Do games need to advertise to get discovered or can we do it in a more social, more viral way? Can games be discovered and joined in the same way as people in social networks? What tools do developers need to be able to build compelling content, get discovered, create social features and independently afford to stay in the game? How can we leverage social concepts like self publishing? How can we create the social web for games from diverse social network platforms? Can existing casual games developers take advantage of the social web and create a new opportunity? Can we re-invigorate industry segments such as pc downloadable games using the social web?
Even in the face of viral social concepts of discovery and relationships, game developers are faced with many obstacles to build their business on social sites.
Our philosophy
J2Play is for existing casual game developers who want to build their own business on the social web and own their installs and active users instead of using a publisher.
We do this by helping Web, Mobile and PC casual game developers make their game social, self-publish to all social sites and take advantage of 270+ million users, use our 11+ viral distribution features to circulate traffic to their game, and keep users coming back with 10+ out-of-the box highly engaging features.
Our model eliminates the traditional publisher/destination site role and is a "developer for developer" model.
Developers currently can use any of their current monetization methods and we will soon be introducing additional revenue opportunities. Our model : all use of the platform is free of charge, and when we introduce our referral based revenue models, we will retain a small platform fee for any revenue we help generate. Also, since there is no destination site in our model, we end up redistributing the traditional publisher margin back to developers and therefore there is more margin to share.
The J2Play solution doesn't require game developers to advertise their game on social sites to generate traffic, however, we believe we justify a social site advertising budget for a game that uses our technology. The reason: we provide an opportunity for each game to become a casual games destination site for their players since other games can be discovered through their game. Therefore the more installs your game achieves the more money you make from referral fees of users discovering games within your game.
Our hope is that this will spark innovation in the social games business where casual game developers will move their business to the social web and then with our help, begin to build new innovative social titles. We are attempting to build a sustainable growing games industry on the social web.
Our vision
To help reshape the game market on the social web and enable growth in social gaming.
Our mission
To enhance social concepts and remove obstacles so Web, Mobile and PC casual game developers can independently move their business to the social web.
How?
J2Play provides a framework that helps:
- Expose your game to all 270+ million social-site users by enabling self-publishing across all social sites and integrating your game into the social games graph.
- Engage your users by making your existing game social (in 5 minutes) with 10+ engagement features that keeps users coming back.
- Generate traffic by making your game viral with 11+ viral distribution features to circulate traffic to your game across all social-sites via the social games graph.
- Make money by introducing a new "developer to developer" referral model and redistributing the traditional publisher margin back to developers.
Historical
A quick history - Rob Balahura founded J2Play in 2006 by creating and commercializing the world's first mobile multiplayer game & SDK, planning ahead for the future of mobile gaming. Evolving that path further lead to the world's first cross-media, web to mobile, games and SDK's. Today J2Play supports over 13 platforms (and counting) which are linked together with an innovative "social web wrapper" based off of all social sites.
J2Play has won awards from Nokia, deployed installations serving millions of users and worked with some of the top casual games companies in the world to help them with their community initiatives. We believe that J2Play delivers the most robust and mature solution for building rich cross-platform social games.