Playyoo - mobile social gaming

Double gold for Playyoo ?

David — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 10:52:25 +0000

Well, the Bejing Olympics will soon draw to a close, but that hasn’t stopped two Playyoo developer members submitting games showing their own amusing twists on two of the controversial issues that threatened to - but let’s be fair, ultimately did not - overshadow the games.

Olympic Torch by bitacora13 challenges you to bring the torch safely home, avoiding protestors.

Meanwhile, you can take over the Chinese Weather Defence Unit, and try to blast the storm-clouds threatening the stadium in Dave Sapiens’s CWDU game.

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Adobe MAX Awards 2008 (hint!!)

David — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 09:14:01 +0000

As Mark Doherty mentions on his blog, nominations for the Adobe MAX Awards 2008 are now open.

I’m not trying to canvas for support or anything, but if you happened to want to nominate your favorite Adobe Flash Lite and Flex-powered mobile games community site, well, I wouldn’t stand in your way

Tags: adobe, flash lite

Playyoo v. iPhone

David — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 07:17:15 +0000

Playyoo members Carlos “Naz” Nazareno and Joseph Cunanana, collectively known as Zen Graffiti Studios, have recently uploaded their game “iPhone Mania” to Playyoo. Taking its cue from the labyrinthine and, initially at least, hopelessly unsuccessful in-store iPhone activation process, iPhone Mania puts you in the role of an Apple Store clerk with a queue of irate customers and only a minute and a half until closing time.

If nothing else, ironically iPhone Mania is a pretty good test for the usability of phone keypads!

I’ll let Naz explain some of his thinking and frustrations about the iPhone:

It seems that everything that Steve Jobs touches turns to gold these days. With his Midas touch and the legions of loyal fans from the cult of Steve, the iPhone 3G has been selling faster than pancakes.

Despite the lack of basic features such as copying and pasting, Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS), and video recording, people have still been flocking to the iPhone in droves.

What’s also curious is that despite the iPhone’s miniscule 10million units per year sales as compared to Nokia’s sales of 1.34million units per day, tech news and developer buzz has never been so high. This becomes even more strange considering that Apple has been actively making it hard for developers to create apps for the iPhone by becoming such a finicky gatekeeper.

Still, the big question on everyone’s mind is:

Why doesn’t the iPhone support Flash?

Please allow Adobe to put Flash on the iPhone, Steve! You know that everyone wants it, and allowing it on the iPhone certainly won’t hurt sales.

Browsing Flash websites aside, how can people play such wonderful Flash games as these on the iPhone if the iPhone doesn’t support Flash? Give us our games, Steve!

Flash on the iPhone 3G: we want it, and we want it now!

We’re certainly neither anti-iPhone nor anti-Apple here at Playyoo, although personally I find the iPhone 3G too big to be a practical mobile phone. But certainly I share Naz’s disappointment that such an attractive piece of hardware is effectively crippled by an unimaginative and over-restrictive application policy. It certainly is the case that an unrestricted platform is potentially at risk from misbehaving or malevolent 3rd party applications, and I would also agree that it is necessary to be extra vigilant in the mobile world. But come on - how many reports are there of, say, Nokia S60 phones, being bricked by bad applications ? And for that matter, how often does the “inherent security” of Mac OS X get rammed down our throats ?

It is difficult to see that the iPhone Application Store policy is about anything other than money really. And over-pricing always has been Steve Jobs’ Achilles heel.

Tags: adobe, nokia

Playyoo in Italiano

David — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 11:18:51 +0000

Abbiamo il piacere di annunciare che adesso Playyoo è disponibile anche in italiano. Potete selezionare la lingua che preferite (inglese o italiano) cliccando sulle bandierine che trovate sul sito Web e su quello WAP

We are pleased to announce that from today Playyoo is also available in Italian. You can select your preferred language by clicking on the flags in the web and mobile sites.

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Playyoo at Techcrunch Zurich

David — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 06:45:39 +0000

Last week, Playyoo took part at the first, but hopefully not last, Techcrunch Zurich meeting. It was a very interesting evening, meeting various other Swiss startups, as well as a host of bloggers, journalists, investors and other luminaries.

You can read a nice roundup by Corsin Camichel, and even see how we coped with the challenge of describing Playyoo to a large audience in 20 seconds.

Our thanks to the organisers for a great evening!

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Announcing the Playyoo Developer Program

David — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 17:00:35 +0000

A few weeks ago, we launched the Playyoo Developer Program, initially with a limited invitation to the group of Flash Lite developers who’ve been with us since the beginning. Now it is open to all Flash developers.

The idea is to try to kick start a market between Flash Lite developers and game buyers. At some point in the fairly near future, we expect 3rd parties to be entering the picture, but to get started, we’re sponsoring games ourselves. The basic idea is that every week, we set a theme, and invite proposals to build a game which responds to it. Once the game is delivered, Playyoo pays a fee to the developer.

[UPDATE: A Clarification: please note, Playyoo is not buying these games. They remain the property of the developer. Playyoo is 100% about user generated content.]

In the first week, the theme was the Euro 2008 soccer championship, and the winning proposal came from Mariam Dholkawala, with Headers Euro 2008. If your team didn’t win, Mariam’s game gives you the chance to rewrite history!

For week 2 (and week 3), we set a more oblique challenge, “global warming”. The first game on that theme was the very creative “Drought” created by Dave Sapien, where you need to help the fish escape the evaporating ponds.

Week 3’s game is in production, and we’re looking forward to it!

This sequence will continue throughout the summer, and maybe longer. Other initiatives are also in the pipeline.

The fact that mobile games like these can be built from scratch and put online in less than 1 week says a lot about the talents of our developers, but also about the power of Flash Lite.

The Playyoo Developer Program has it’s own private area in the Playyoo forums, for members to exchange ideas, discuss concepts, and for us to post requests for games.

If you want to show the world what you can do with Flash Lite, and perhaps start making some money from your talents, why not sign up ?

To qualify for the PDP, Playyoo members need to:

upload at least 2 custom games (not Game Creator)
have at least one game favourited by at least 10 members
have accrued at least 20 verified downloads
be approved by the Playyoo PDP manager

To remain a member

maintain at least 2 games at all times
upload at least 1 game per year
agree to and keep to the terms and conditions of the PDP

Tags: flash lite

Playyoo version 1.0.09

David — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 13:09:29 +0000

We’re pleased to announce the release of version 1.0.09 of Playyoo. There are some significant changes here, but they’re mostly under the surface. We’ve made some fixes, and some enhancements, to the algorithm driving the Game Stream, which is Playyoo’s way of getting games to you. The biggest change is that the “sushi belt model” is now working. After you play a game from your main Game Stream channel on your phone (the default view), it is removed. You can find it afterwards in the “Recently Played” channel, and if you really like it, you can add to your “Favourites” channel. The idea here is that every time you access Playyoo on your phone, you’ll be presented with a new game to try.

You may notice a few other changes. For example, if you have ticked “Auto-accept pick of the day” in your Game Stream settings, unless you’ve played it before, then the current pick of the day will show up at the top of your game stream.

The Game Stream viewer navigation has also been changed, as shown below:

You can reset your Game Stream to recommended defaults by using the settings illustrated here.

We’ve got some good stuff in the pipeline, and we’re aiming to address a lot of the issues raised during the survey we carried out a while back. We’re always pleased to hear feedback, positive or negative (although we like positive even more!).

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What’s going on at Playyoo

David — Fri, 23 May 2008 15:34:59 +0000

We’ve been a bit quiet recently on where we’re going with Playyoo, so here’s quick update.

Although on the face of it Playyoo has many similarities with other user generated content sites, we need to do quite a lot of heavy lifting behind the scenes to make sure we deliver correctly configured games to each phone model we support. Web developers get frustrated having to deal with browser incompatibilities across a handful of browser / operating system combinations, but mobile software developers have to deal with literally hundreds of devices on many, many networks. This was one of the initial challenges we set out to solve with Playyoo, and we’ve spent a lot of time on it.

For the first version, we had a lot of support from an external partner, who I can’t name for various reasons, but who I’d like to express our thanks to! However, now we’re on our own, with a relatively small in-house software development team working on enhancements and new features.

The first thing we’re tackling is to greatly improve the game selection process, which powers the Game Stream, to give users more control over it, and to provide better results out of the box. We’ve got a whole stack of other things lined up, many taking into account user feedback from the last few months.

You should see some changes starting to appear in the next few weeks or so, as we get back up to speed with development and releases.

We always appreciate and listen to feedback, good or bad, either here, by email, or on the forum. We’re pretty excited about the directions we’re going in with Playyoo, and I hope you will be too!

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Cartoon Network gets in on the game creator party

Tim — Wed, 21 May 2008 08:00:23 +0000

Animation magazine has reported on Cartoon Network’s successful launch of its Ben 10 Alien Force Game Creator which has seen more than 20 million game plays in its first week. Molly Chase, VP and executive producer of Cartoon Network New Media says “Our online fans are building and sharing this game and enjoying an unprecedented level of interaction with both a favorite show and their fellow fans. We see this type of game as a wave of the future for the online gaming market and have already begun work on expanding the experience to feature another popular network franchise.”

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Mobile games in education

Tim — Tue, 20 May 2008 08:43:12 +0000

One of the more challenging games submitted to the Playyoo launch contest was Think Fast by Izam. It’s an educational game that challenges players to solve math questions, quicker answers are rewarded with more points. Our initial reaction was "What a great idea!".

Now, according to ReadWriteWeb, a book has been released by MIT professor and director of MIT’s Scheller Teacher Education Program Eric Klopfer which makes the case that mobile games can augment other education tools.

Tags: contest

Playyoo - mobile social gaming

Double gold for Playyoo ?

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Adobe MAX Awards 2008 (hint!!)

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Playyoo v. iPhone

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Playyoo in Italiano

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Playyoo at Techcrunch Zurich

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Announcing the Playyoo Developer Program

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Playyoo version 1.0.09

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What’s going on at Playyoo

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