PapayaMobile has decided that they will not be making any more game themselves anymore. Instead, they have announced today that they will cease game development and their latest in-house developed game, Pet Paradise, will be their last. No they aren’t closing their doors, they are just solely focusing on helping developers instead.
How do they plan to help developers? By developing and expanding their mobile game development tools and offering developers access to open source coding of their back catalog of titles (called the Collective-Social Initiative). This shift in business from both game development and developer tools development to solely expanding tools for developers is also to show their strong commitment to Android as a gaming platform. By focusing on just the tools developers need to be successful in the game development business, developers will have a better chance at not only making great games but being successful as well.
For more detailed information, check out the full press release below. Speaking of Pet Paradise, they have released this game onto the Android Market today as well. Available for free and in beta form, Pet Paradise is a virtual pet game where you take care of your virtual pet, customize them and do all sorts of activities.
Developer Website: PapayaMobile
PapayaMobile Releases Pet Paradise, Announces It Will Stop Publishing Games and Focus Completely On Mobile Social Network Expansion
Pet Paradise Available Now on Android Market, Open Source Code for Back Catalog Games Available to Developers
PapayaMobile (http://papayamobile.com), the leading games social networking service on Android with over 15 million unique active users, today announced that its latest mobile social game, Pet Paradise, is now available for Android devices. The full-featured title is immediately available for free download on the Android Market, and joins PapayaMobile’s successful library of freemium games. Pet Paradise is the last game to be developed and published internally by PapayaMobile. The company now plans to entirely focus on providing developers with the tools and services to more effectively drive user engagement, distribution and monetization of games, as well as making it easier for developers to create games by open sourcing Papaya Game Engine code from its back catalogue of titles.
PapayaMobile is further opening the door to aspiring game creators by introducing the Collective-Social initiative, a new company charter that will give developers access to Papaya Game Engine source code used in creating several of Papaya’s back catalog of games. With access to open source code, along with PapayaMobile’s existing Papaya Game Engine, Social SDK and Offer SDK, developers on Android have the tools they need to build high quality mobile social gaming experiences from the ground up. As further updates are released for each of PapayaMobile’s products, PapayaMobile may also create sample apps that showcase new features and immediately open source them in order to educate the developer community on these new tools.
“As part of our initial launch strategy, one of our key objectives was to develop games to catalyze the growth of our social networking service and fine tune the interaction between social games and the underlying social network,” said Si Shen, Co-Founder and CEO of PapayaMobile. “Now, having more than 15 million users and over 350 games running on our platform, we have met these objectives and the focus will be 100% directed at helping developers maximize ROI for their titles.”
“We have heard repeatedly from the developer community that it is critical for a platform to remain neutral,” said Paul Chen, Head of Business Development at PapayaMobile. “As soon as a social network begins publishing its own games, there will inevitably be conflicts of interest on activities like driving traffic and network promotions. We do not want to place our developers in a position in which traffic from their games are being forcefully redirected to games we publish ourselves. That does not place our developer’s best interest at heart.”
For more information about PapayaMobile, please visit: http://papayamobile.com/.
- About PapayaMobile
Founded in 2008 by CEO Si Shen and CTO Qian Wenjie, PapayaMobile provides both tools for game developers and content for players on its growing social mobile network of over 15 million users worldwide. With headquarters in Beijing and offices in San Francisco and London, PapayaMobile offers developers a fast and easy way to reach millions of users across the globe and improve their return on investment for Android game development. Players can participate in high quality social mobile gaming experiences with rich community interaction across Papaya’s rapidly growing network of hosted games. http://papayamobile.com/
