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Raphael "Raph" Koster is an American entrepreneur, game designer, and author of A Theory of Fun for Game Design. Koster is widely recognized for his work as the lead designer of Ultima Online and the creative director behind Star Wars Galaxies. From 2006 until 2013 he worked as the founder and president of Metaplace producing a Facebook game platform.
Acclaim Games Incorporated was an American video game company that offered free massively multiplayer online role-playing games on its website upon registration. The company was founded in 2006 and was the successor to Acclaim Entertainment in terms of brand name. After Acclaim Entertainment filed for bankruptcy, former Activision CEO Howard Marks purchased the "Acclaim" name in September 2004 for a reported $100,000. He, along with Neil Malhotra, set up a new company, Acclaim Games, that was to take a different approach to the market than Acclaim Entertainment.
hi5 is an American social networking service based in San Francisco, California. It is owned by The Meet Group.
Metaplace was a software platform intended to democratize the development of virtual worlds, which was later used to make Facebook games. The company was established by Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies designer Raph Koster. According to the official website, the platform was "client-agnostic", which means that virtual worlds developed on Metaplace can be accessed using any device that connects to the Web.
PlayFirst, Inc. is a Delaware based American publisher of casual games founded in 2004 by industry veterans. PlayFirst produced the Diner Dash series, which won the 2008 Annual Casual Game Awards. and has seen over 550 million downloads. The popularity of Diner Dash series prompted spin-off series like Wedding Dash and Cooking Dash. The company’s game portfolio also includes the retro-style strategy-based Chocolatier series, and the adventure/hidden object-mixing Dream Chronicles series.
Tagged is a social discovery website based in San Francisco, California, founded in 2004. It allows members to browse the profiles of any other members, and share tags and virtual gifts. Tagged claims it has 300 million members as of 2014. As of September 2011, Quantcast estimates Tagged monthly unique users at 5.9 million in the United States, and 18.6 million globally. Michael Arrington wrote in April 2011 that Tagged is most notable for the ability to grow profitably during the era of Facebook.
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Playdom, Inc. was an online social network game developer popular on Facebook, Google+ and Myspace. The company was founded in the San Francisco Bay Area by University of California, Berkeley graduates Ling Xiao and Chris Wang and Swarthmore College graduate Dan Yue. In 2009, the market for games played on social networking sites was valued at $300 million, consisting mostly of online sales of virtual goods.
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Kabam is a Canadian video game developer and publisher founded in 2006 and headquartered in Vancouver, with offices in Montreal, San Francisco, and Austin, Texas. The company develops and publishes massively multiplayer social games such as Marvel Contest of Champions and Transformers: Forged to Fight for mobile devices. Before expanding into gaming, Kabam established itself as a social applications developer with focusing on entertainment and sports.
i-Jet Media is a Russian distribution network and publisher of social games on web portals and social networks. It was founded in 2005 and published its first game, Maffia News, in 2007. The company has foreign offices in Silicon Valley, United States and Beijing, China.
Zynga Poker is a social game developed by Zynga as an application for the social-networking website Facebook as well as Android, iPhone, Windows Phone, Windows, MySpace, Tagged, and Google+. It was launched in July 2007.
Marvel Avengers Alliance was a 2012 turn-based social-network game developed by American studio Offbeat Creations and published by Playdom. It is based on characters and storylines published by Marvel Comics. The game was available as an Adobe Flash application via the social-networking website Facebook. It launched in Facebook on March 1, 2012. It was initially released as promotion for the 2012 Marvel Studios film The Avengers.
Wild Ones was a video game published by Playdom. It was released on 18 December 2009 and closed on 28 August 2013, becoming one of Playdom's most popular games.
References
- ↑ "Virtual Worlds opened up to all". BBC News. 2007-09-19. Archived from the original on 11 October 2007. Retrieved 2007-09-19.
- ↑ "Playdom Buys Resurgent Social Games Startup Metaplace". ContentNext Media. 2010-07-08. Archived from the original on 11 July 2010. Retrieved 2010-08-02.
