Come2play wants to make multi-player games go social. The company offers a white label multi-player game API with a flavor both for site owners and game developers.
Come2play was founded by 3 Israelis (Alon Barzilay, Erez Naveh and Yoav Zibin) in June 2007 and currently has 7 employees in Haifa, Israel. According to crunchbase Come2Play has raised $950k as a seed round from Yossi Vardi, Israeli internet and start up guru.
Described as the Ning of casual gaming, Come2play offers a unique open API design to make single flash games into multi-player games. On top of that, come2play will help developers distribute their games in all major social communities VIA their game widgets and widgets gallery.
The Come2play API frees game developers from the hassle of creating and running a multi-player environment and instead lets them concentrate on the heavy task of creating a fabulous game. After the game is ready, all that’s left for developers is to implement what come2play promises to be a very simply and easy to use API and vualla, they have a multi-player game ready to run.
The API also helps developers add to their game social features such as game rooms and chat rooms, leader board, ranking system, statistics & reports and more. Game developers can also implement VIA the API ad space and let come2play manage the ad mechanism. Even more, come2play gives developers the tools to port their game to Facebook and other open social apps.
The downside of what looks to me as a very appealing offer, is that developers using the API must run their game on the Come2play infrastructure, host the game on the company servers, be part of Come2play’s games channel and, if there is any ad revenue, split it 50/50 with the company.
On the other side of the internet food chain, come2play offers site owners (publishers) an easy way to add multi-player games to their site. Similar to other casual gaming sites such as Big Fish and Pogo, publishers can add a single game or a whole gallery of games by embedding code to site.
The games can be branded, they can show ads (and share revenue) and they can be distributed on and on, since users visiting the site can take the game widget and emended them over again.
Come2play definitely has the potential to get multi-player game widgets going around in the web. The API platform as well as the game galleries are designed to make smart use of the web social nature and they implement many of the social features we grew custom to see.
But design by itself does not promise anything. Though we have seen companies working the field games for social networks before, come2play offers flash game developers a unique offer that holds the key for come2play’s success. If game developers buy-in and use the API, Come2play’s own game gallery will become more attractive to end-users, giving them an incentive to spread the word around. This will be an interesting one to follow.
This post was contributed by VC Cafe’s newest member, Liraz Axelrad, an experienced product manager, expert in the world of internet and mobile web with great love to all things webby.
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I'm a former general partner at google ventures, head of Google for Entrepreneurs in Europe and founding head of Campus London, Google's first physical hub for startups.
I'm also the founder of Techbikers, a non-profit bringing together the startup ecosystem on cycling challenges in support of Room to Read. Since inception in 2012 we've built 11 schools and 50 libraries in the developing world.
