March 1st, 2009 by Arjan Olsder Posted in Platforms: J2me | 3 Comments »
Just before MWC, Javaground told us they had something special to show. When they told us it was an App Store, we were disappointed… When we got the demo, we were truly amazed by them!
With Xpressed.com, the company kicks off their mobile games portal adventures in the US. Though still in Beta, the portal is already stuffed with content and lots of smart features to stimulate both consumers and developers to interact with the service. In this article, we will focus on the web portal, but the company also offers a full on-device game explorer.
There are so many features in this platform, so let's start off with the consumer experience. The site opens with a weekly top 10, a coverflow like navigational window that promoted hot titles and an advert for their unlimited games plan.
The Unlimited Games plan means that consumers sign up for a subscription instead of one-off payments per download. Consumers will pay only $ 9,99 a month and then have free access to most of the portfolio (developers decide). This billing construction works via j2me wrappers. This means that the wrapper will check if the consumer is allowed to play the games.
Next to downloading and purchasing mobile games, consumers can comment on them on the portal and so, inform others about the quality of the mobile games which they are about to purchase.
When it comes to checking out the mobile games, the comments and ratings are not the only element that help consumers out. They can also play a demo of the game on the site itself, or even download a demo to their handsets. This demo is also enabled via a wrapper, and so the developer decides how long the demo time will last. Needless to say, the platform is a very easy way for developers to make available free demo's. Consumers can also copy/paste the html of the web demo on their own websites and blogs (which is actually also interesting for mobile game developers who like to offer this option on their own websites).
So what about the developer side? They just have to sign up like any regular consumer. Everybody in the system has the power to start it's own games studio. To avoid a lot of rubbish and pirated games from being uploaded, the company does check all uploaded games.
When a studio has been created, developers can fully communicate with their community, and based on that community, receive digital awards. To give developers even more credits in the portal, there are also awards that can be won based on the number of downloads and various other elements.
When it comes to pricing and revenue kickbacks, there are various scenarios to choose from.
“Our philosophy is to have developers control the relationship with the end-user by setting pricing, demo times, … We believe in free market with minimal regulations (enough to keep order and a fair competition system).” said Alexandre Kral of Javaground.
At the end of this story I feel like I must have forgotten various features of this App Store like portal. Though the competition from settled channels will be fierce, Javaground has clearly shown us a great and well thought through initiative for a platform that has been dominating the industry for years; J2me.
I have mobile games content loaded onto this portal and hope it does well over time as it’s a very nice looking site indeed.
Very interesting… I’ll definitely keep my eye on them, although they have a lot of competition out there. You should have given more info on who founded it and if they are funded (and by who).
If you check out Javaground on Wikipedia you can see a whole bunch of titles they did for Sony, almost all of them with links to the demo on their site. I couldn’t find any info about if they’re funded, but presumably their game development and tools suite (Xpress Suite) is funding them.