One of India’s most popular gaming platforms Indiagames is launching a nifty new Cricket iPhone app, called Cricket T20 Fever. Cricket is hugely popular in India and the new app will be a feature rich gaming app that will aim to simulate the experience of playing the sport and competing against other players.
The game will launch first on the iPhone and as a PC browser based game and within a few months be available on additional platforms like Symbian, Symbian, Maemo, PSP, Xbox Live Arcade and Nintendo DSi. And the app will feature Facebook Connect.
HBO has released their very own app for the iPhone, and it’s surprisingly deep for an app released by a premium cable channel. There’s the obvious stuff — you can view schedules and watch clips and previews of HBO shows as well as behind-the-scenes and other content. But there’s even some cool iPhone-specific stuff, like creating SMS reminders when your shows come on, some hidden object games to play, and even the option to buy some shows with hooks straight into iTunes. The app is designed pretty well, too, and for an app that’s basically promoware, there’s a lot of content and features included.
It’s very well done — if you don’t have HBO, you probably won’t need the app, but if you are a subscriber with an iPhone or iPod touch, it’s well worth the free download.
Most people would probably view a hardcore, 16 hour-a-day addiction to World of Warcraft as a bad thing. That was certainly the case for Hubert Thieblot a few years ago, when he dropped out of school and his parents decided to kick him out of the house because he was playing so much. Flash forward five years. Thieblot has managed to turn his addiction into a thriving company called Curse that generated over $3 million in revenue this year. Today, the company is disclosing a $6 million Series B round it closed in early 2009 with participation from Ventech Capital, AGF Private Equity, and SoftTech VC (Jeff Clavier). The round brings Curse’s total funding to $11 million, after a $5 million Series A round in 2007 led by AGF Private Equity.
In some senses, Curse is akin to a SourceForge for computer games, in that it offers a directory of plugins that players can use to customize and enhance their PC games. Many of the site’s users are World of Warcraft fans, who have made Curse.com the definitive site for WoW add-ons. Alongside its directory, Curse also makes a native client players can use to manage their plugins that currently has over 1.6 million active users
Zynga’s massively successful moneymaking machine is about to get another way to reach its millions of avid users. Today, the company is starting to test SMS notifications, allowing a small number of users to receive updates directly to their mobile phones. The first 50 TechCrunch readers to sign up here will be able to try it out for themselves, though it’s limited to Mafia Wars only for now. It’s a feature that’s going to be good news to the game’s millions of addicts and also represents a very important strategic move for the company. Because it’s one more thing that Zynga won’t have to rely on Facebook for.
Zynga’s ties with Facebook run deep. They now share some of the same investors, including Russian firm Digital Sky Technologies which has poured as much as $400 million into Facebook and just led a $180 million round in Zynga. Zynga is rumored to be Facebook’s largest advertiser. And Facebook’s viral features have played a huge role in helping Zynga rise to prominence. But despite all of this, it’s in Zynga’s best interest to keep as much control over its own games as possible.
Voting is now open for the third annual 2009 Crunchies Awards to celebrate the best technology accomplishments of 2009. Everyone is eligible and encouraged to vote once per day per award category through Wednesday, January 6 at midnight pst. There are 18 award categories to recognize accomplishments across a variety of fields and roles.
Finalists, grab a badge to get your community to vote for you as a winner. And please email us, so we can get you prepared for the ceremony.
Whenever you talk about games on a mobile platform, you usually have to also mention that while things like high-end 3D graphics are certainly possible, there are usually some concessions that have to be made. But in the case of the iPhone, perhaps not: Epic Games has apparently been showing Anandtech their Unreal Engine 3 on Apple’s handheld, the same graphical engine that runs modern console hits like Gears of War 2 and Batman: Arkham Asylum. There’s even video, and the thing looks pretty darn incredible. It’s possible that in the hands of a skilled developer, you could have a very impressive realistic graphical game running on the iPhone hardware.
Some of the iPhone hardware, that is — the engine was shown off on the 3GS and the 3rd generation iPod touch, so only those have the speed and power (and the OpenGL ES 2.0) to pull this off. But it’s impressive nevertheless. Epic hasn’t licensed this version of the engine yet as far as we know, but they promise to show off more in the future, so we’ll be keeping an eye out. One more version of the iPhone, and we might be looking at games that can compete graphically with even modern consoles.
There’s certainly plenty of good looking iPhone games available these days, but things could be about to get quite a bit more interesting, as Epic has now demonstrated its Unreal Engine 3 (the same one used for games like Gears of War 2) running on the iPhone 3GS and 3rd gen iPod touch. Unfortunately, it hasn’t also announced any games or licensees that will be using the engine, but it seems like it has at least managed to get it running remarkably well on the hardware — albeit in a somewhat limited demo, as you can see in the video after the break. What’s more, Epic also reportedly said that it would be showing off the engine running on “another mobile platform entirely” at CES next month, but didn’t drop any further hints besides that.
Continue reading Epic shows off Unreal Engine 3 running on iPhone / iPod touch
Tonight I settled in to write a post about how exciting it was that you could play old school public-domain and freeware Nintendo games on your iPhone now, thanks to Jonathan Zdziarski and Nescaline, the app he built to do just that. Ah, Kid Icarus and Ninja Gaiden and Zelda and Mario, all my old friends back again (if I had legal licenses to the ROM images, of course). I was excited to relive my pixelated past, but it was not to be. Jason updated his site this evening saying Nescaline had been pulled: Nescaline was removed from the AppStore by Apple at 22:19 PST tonight. I haven’t received anything from Apple as to why. I predict they’ve either proven to be a pushover to Nintendo, who has no valid claim against Nescaline, or decided they really didn’t want the ability to play NES games in the AppStore. NESv3 continues to be available in Cydia. Apple’s draconian and anti-competitive AppStore practices is [sic] sadly why jailbreaking will always remain a necessity. I was all set to be indignant about this, but then I read the update again. Is it possible that Apple yanked it simply for being available on Cydia? Not being the person at my house who runs a jailbroken iPhone, I don’t have any experience with anything being available through Cydia that is also available on the App Store. I know there are those who have been pulled from the App Store for one reason or another and made their way to Cydia, but I can’t find any apps that seem to be available in both places.
I would like to think this is the issue Apple saw with Nescaline and that’s why it vanished, since the “Nintendo’s knickers are in a twist” reason seems more heavy-handed. Then again, there’s also the “no un-vetted code running in emulation” rule that the C64 emulator ran afoul of previously, which might well be the issue.
We recently wrote about gWallet, a startup that hopes to offer a legitimate virtual currency monetization platform, after OfferPal, and others have recently come under fire (a.k.a. “Scamville”) for scamming users of virtual games on social networks. The startup, which recently raised $10.5 million in funding, works directly with brands directly as opposed to adopting an affiliate leads model. gWallet claims that its proprietary technology and transparent platform allows game developers and social networks to see when and where exact offers are being presented within their ecosystems.
The startup wouldn’t reveal the details of what its platform would look and feel like, but today is giving us a little bit more insight into how it will work. gWallet is launching gLTV, a new metric that will aim to give publishers analytics on how they can measure and increase their lifetime value of users on their applications. gWallet says gLTV uses info about individual users to demonstrate specifically how it can increase the lifetime value of a user based on prior usage and transaction history. Currently, publishers cannot see how they are increasing the lifetime value of their users. Other virtual currency platforms can only measure yield through a CPM model, which measures how much revenue is generated after a thousand views on their offer wall.
Well, even with rampant piracy, review craziness, and that funky approval process, it’s good to hear that someone can still make a truckload of cash on the App Store. According to Reuters, that someone is Tapulous, who is apparently making almost a million dollars a month thanks to twenty million downloads of their Tap Tap Revenge game. We recently talked to Andrew Lacy on the release of said game back in October, and he told us that the game’s in-app purchase features (you get the game for cheap, and then have a chance to buy lots of extra music to play in packs and bundles) would be the “first big test of in-app commerce at a much grander scale.” Looks like the test was a success.
Of course, there’s not too many details on how exactly that million dollars comes in — I’m sure there was a flurry of sales right around the release of the app (as press was dropping), and you’d expect them to be a little higher during the holidays (sales of video games usually are, no matter what platform you’re talking about). So it’s not completely proven that this kind of income is necessarily sustainable. But still, it’s good to hear from the folks at Tapulous that someone can release a game and roll in the cash from Apple’s platform.