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Social networking and entertainment site Hi5 have announced a Game Developer Program aimed to attract studios away from a ‘saturated market’ and onto their platform.
Bundled into the program is a series of marketing, promotion, revenue share and tech intergration benefits available only to participating studios.
The marketing and promotion package provides free banner ads, a position on the Hi5 games page, games tool bar and user recommendations.
The Hi5 Coins payment interface allows games to include in-game micropayments and gives access to upwards of 60 payment methods and 30 currencies. Detonator Games’ DetoNation is also integrated into Hi5 Coins.
Hi5 has also said that revenue sharing on premium advertising allows new studios to gain favorable advertising revenue generated from all games.
The firm offers one-click automatic game installs, notifications in Hi5 Friend Updates and open viral channels to users of participating studios’ titles. Facebook compatible APIs and game specific APIs also allow interaction with user profiles to post achievements and high scores.
"To date, social games have been distributed on open platforms competing against thousands of other titles with nothing but their own spamminess to get them discovered. As the market has saturated, getting noticed has become more and more difficult and expensive, particularly for smaller developers," Hi5 CTO Alex St John.
"Hi5’s new Game Developer Program solves this problem by providing great games with free promotion, rapid audience acquisition and favorable revenue share for new content on Hi5," he added.
