Welcome!

Login Register
< > Spotify available now for iPhone ... Greystripe boss slams AdMob's acquisition ...

Playfish CEO welcomes Facebook Connect for mobile web

Stuart Dredge
Playfish CEO welcomes Facebook Connect for mobile web

But Kristian Segerstrale is also enthusiastic about mobile users playing social games through their handsets' browsers.

Facebook's launch of Facebook Connect for mobile web has been welcomed by Kristian Segerstrale, CEO of social games firm Playfish.

However, he says there are still obstacles remaining to social games becoming as popular on mobile as they are on Facebook and other web-based social networks.

"It's a very cool development, and part of a wider spread of initiatives to broaden the social discovery of mobile games," he says.

"Mobile is finally starting to move away from catalogue-based discovery mechanism to a social discovery mechanism, where you see what your friends are doing."

Does this mean we can expect a flood of social games to appear on Nokia's Ovi Store in the near future? Segerstrale points out that the availability of Facebook Connect is just one part of the puzzle.

One unsolved issue is that mobile games using the Facebook Connect technology are still usually discovered through a deck - whether an operator portal or handset maker's app store - and that has limitations.

"You still suffer from the fact that it's a single deck with Top 25 and Featured games, rather than the fluid discovery that you see on Facebook," he says.

"Our games are ultimately not best suited to environments where you have to go through the deck to find them. However, we are very deliberately building out IP that is going to work on these platforms."

However, Segerstrale is optimistic about developments in mobile browser technology that allows people to access Facebook and play its games through their browsers. At Nokia World this week, we learned that Nokia's N900 is capable of this.

"It's very much a sign of what is to come," says Segerstrale. "The convergence between gameplay and online and mobile is inevitable, so it's great to start seeing steps in that direction where you can genuinely have the same experience on a mobile as you do online."

Handsets like the N900 are still very much high-end devices: no games company is yet thinking of ditching downloadable apps in favour of browser-only games. But Segerstrale says there are advantages to offering browser-based mobile games.

"If you're operating games as a service, it's harder to do that with downloads," he says. "The developer can control the full evolution of the experience: you don't have that machinery between you and the consumer of the QA and approvals loop, or the fact that the consumer has to actively go and update the application. With Flash or anything else that's streamed or delivered by thin client, you can always serve them with the latest version of the game."

Segerstrale says this trend is about more than just Flash-enabled mobile handset browsers, though. He points to a new wave of internet-connected devices - including netbooks and multimedia tablets - which will be capable of playing games through their browsers as well as through downloadable applications.

"Flash is an important technology there, and Nokia's devices are a great vote of confidence in that direction," he says.

Advertisement

Tags: facebook connect , playfish