Hitting a milestone in its efforts to go digital, Electronic Arts has completed a major software engineering project to enable gamers to use a single identity across game platforms, even if those platforms are operated by different companies.

If a player buys an EA game, the company will be able to follow that player across platforms such as the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, the iPhone, Facebook, and EA’s own Origin online gaming service, said Rajat Taneja, the chief technology officer at EA, in an exclusive interview with GamesBeat.

The move will enable EA to follow gamers wherever they want to play and still track their activity, and that could help EA embrace new business models and target better marketing pitches at gamers as they play EA’s games.

“Our strategic vision at EA is to create a single backend system so that we can truly embrace the secular trends in our industry that are creating massive growth for games,” he said. “And we will be able to embrace all of the new business models that come with that.”

One example is appointment gaming, where a player can find friends in a game regardless of what platform they are in and then start a multiplayer session with them, so long as the game permits that kind of play. EA’s technology will allow it to find a gamer in real time and then communicate the friend’s message in a timely manner.

The task took a team of 1,500 engineers more than 18 months to complete, and it is part of a major investment that EA chief executive John Riccitiello has made in helping EA cross the bridge from a pure retail game publisher to a multiplatform digital games company. Much of that ambition has been rhetorical, but the single identity is proof that EA is serious about making the digital transition. The company promised the technology a year ago, and the single identity is the first step in a strategy to creating a unified platform across all of EA’s games and platforms.

“We realized this was a non-trivial problem and that many people had tried to do this for years,” Taneja said. “Everything we do is putting the consumer front and center. We rebuilt our backend infrastructure on a fundamental level. It’s all about entertainment, but we realize that the way consumers are interacting with entertainment is different. They consume in bite-size chunks throughout the day, on the console, on a PC at work, and on mobile.”

Part of the trick is to separate “identifier” from “identity.” Gamers have their Facebook identities, their Google Gmail accounts, Microsoft Xbox Live gamertags, and other IDs. But Taneja said that gamers can self-identify themselves any way they want. Now, a player could log into Bejeweled on an iPhone, and EA would know that you are the same player that also plays Plants vs. Zombies on the PC. It calls this an “open garden.”

“We built the glue in the backend to connect the gamer across platforms,” Taneja said.

Another benefit is persistent state. That is, a player can play on one platform and then move to another. On the new platform, the player can access the same game at the same point and continue playing.

“All of our games will enable types of experiences that are congruent and consistent on the PC, consoles, smartphones, and tablets,” he said. “We have a complete re-architecture of our data systems that gives us a single view of the data.”

EA can use the telemetry from the tracking to make recommendations to a player on a faster cycle.

“It used to take one or two days before we could make a recommendation, but now we can do so on an hourly basis and are moving to real time,” Taneja said. “We can do better custom offers, promotion, and reaction to gamer feedback.”

On top of that, the data unification will save EA about 50 percent on its data storage costs. Taneja said the company leaned on available technologies to authenticate users. It didn’t reinvent everything that has already been created.

“We have no religion around that,” he said. “We can connect to any standard applications programming interface for authentication.”

Once EA authenticates a user, it can then provision him with a game that is customized to exactly what the consumer is entitled to play based on the purchases he has made. The business models will be determined later. But EA could conceivably charge less money for a game that is available only on one platform or more money for a game that is played across multiple platforms.

“This will have a material effect on our costs for our digital revenues and a positive effect on our revenues,” he said. “We think this will be a great differentiator for our company.”

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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For game companies, nirvana is being able to make a game that runs on a bunch of platforms. And social-mobile game publisher SGN believes it has just that with the announcement today of MasterKey.

The Los Angeles company has created a cross-platform game development platform that allows it to create a social game on Facebook with Adobe’s Flash technology and then publish the title relatively quickly on mobile platforms such as Apple’s iOS (iPad, iPad Mini, iPod Touch, and iPhone), Android devices, and the web.

Chris DeWolfe, the chief executive of SGN, told GamesBeat that MasterKey took the company 18 months to create. The aim is to streamline development and reduce the time, cost, and manpower required to publish a game across the four platforms. The company has already used the platform to launch its successful games Panda Jam (pictured at top) and Bingo Blingo (pictured right).

“Consumers want to be able to play our games on every device and platform, so it’s a top priority for SGN to execute a cross-platform strategy effectively,” said DeWolfe, who was one of the original founders of social network MySpace. “MasterKey enables us to do so efficiently while creating multiple revenue streams for each game we develop.”

For users, the benefit is that they can start playing a game on one device, such as the PC, and then switch to another, such as an iPhone. The gamer can pick up where they left off. On top of that, the cross-platform games are monetizing 70 percent better than the non-cross-platform games.

DeWolfe said the new proprietary technology allows the company to cut the time it takes to convert a title to a new platform by up to 80 percent. In the past, he said, SGN has learned painfully that games created in the old way had to be re-created from the ground up for each new platform. SGN has applied for a patent for the technology. DeWolfe said it takes a week or two to move to a new platform.

The company is using the technology to publish its own games at first, but it will also make it available to third-party developers who publish their games through SGN.

DeWolfe (pictured right) formed his game company a few years ago with the acquisition of MindJolt and funding from Austin Ventures. He acquired SGN and Hall Pass. And he kept the SGN name for the overall company, and he has been busy moving beyond the MindJolt game portal on Facebook to mobile games. To date, SGN games have been installed more than 200 million times on both mobile and social platforms. SGN is growing its revenues and is profitable, said DeWolfe. But watching Zynga’s declining performance this year taught DeWolfe that he had to diversify beyond one platform.

“We had to do this once we started acquiring companies on different platforms,” said DeWolfe. “We had several development groups with no way to pull the intellectual property together. It was incredibly frustrating.”

DeWolfe said his company studied HTML5, the lingua franca of the web, but concluded that it wasn’t ready for games. MasterKey, by contrast, allows the team to create games that function as if they were developed with native code for different platforms.

“The benefit is you can make money in four places instead of one or two,” he said. “If you draw a parallel to movies, you take it for granted that you don’t have to make a different movie for theatrical release, DVD, or Netflix.

Facebook is still a great platform to launch on because it is good for quickly acquiring new users, said DeWolfe. SGN has game studios in Buenos Aires and San Francisco. Rivals include Spaceport I/O, Zynga, and a variety of other companies trying to do cross-platform games.

SGN has 85 employees and 35 million monthly active users. DeWolfe said that the company is still considering growing through acquisitions.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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American McGee moved from the U.S. to China six years ago and set up a Western game studio making cool triple-A games. Now his Spicy Horse Games is launching a title called Crazy Fairies that has some unique characteristics as a cross-platform, real-time, multiplayer game with cool graphics.

Crazy Fairies is launching today on Facebook, on Kongregate.com indie game portal, and on Spicy Horse’s own website. Within 30 days, it will also launch on iOS (Apple’s iPad, iPod Touch, and iPhone) and Android devices. That’s a big achievement since every company in the game industry wants to spread to new platforms without raising costs or fragmenting their audiences into separate silos.

“We have yet to see a real-time multiplayer game that works on Android to Apple, from PC web browser to Mac, [and] across tablets and phones,” McGee (pictured right) said in an interview with GamesBeat. “The technology for it exists, but it’s a little bit more than off-the-shelf technology to get it working.”

The free-to-play game uses the Unity 3D game engine, which works across platforms. As with other Unity-based games, you download the engine once, and then you can play such titles without having to download the software again in the future.

Crazy Fairies also uses Spicy Horse’s own back-end client-server technology that enables a player on one platform to play another on a different platform in real-time multiplayer play. Other titles allow for cross-platform play, but they are often limited to 2D graphics or slow, asynchronous gameplay. Crazy Fairies uses a single code base across all devices and operating systems.

“We see this as the next step,” McGee said. “We captured all of the pieces — multiplayer, cross-platform, tablets, and phones — in one title.”

Crazy Fairies is the third game to use the company’s tech, which also has social features that increase engagement. You can, for instance, purchase virtual goods in one game and make use of them in another. That helps games spread more easily from player to player with minimal marketing. Crazy Fairies will be released in all territories.

“The economy all blends together across games like Crazy Fairies and Big Head Bash,” McGee said.

While Spicy Horse started as just a game studio, it has now taken on more functions as a publisher. If their games take off as expected, then Spicy Horse may not need a traditional publisher. And that, in turn, could produce some real disruption in the business.

The Shanghai-based company has been working on the tech for about a year, and it made Crazy Fairies in the past six months. Spicy Games was established six years ago to develop console titles such as Alice: Madness Returns for publisher Electronic Arts. The company recruited top Chinese talent to make its games and paid better than local market rates.

But McGee moved away from the consoles in early 2011. The company raised $3 million from Vickers Ventures (now Vickers Capital Group) and switched to cross-platform games on the web and mobile devices.

Spicy Horse has 50 employees. McGee believes the firm is the largest Western independent game studio in China.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Grand Cru is announcing today it has raised $2 million in seed funding to build a kids online adventure game called Supernauts.

The company is entering a crowded field, but Grand Cru chief executive Markus Pasula said in an interview with VentureBeat that the company is trying to bring kids entertainment into a more modern, cross-platform environment. Supernauts is the first in a series of games.

“We didn’t think any of the popular social games were very fun,” Pasula said. “The timing is perfect for doing something technically more advanced.”

Harri Granholm, creative director at Grand Cru, said, “It’s frustrating to look at the current state of social games when you know what’s possible in true multiplayer environments. We saw a huge opportunity there and set out to do it right. We want everybody to stop clicking cows and start sharing adventures and make things together. We think people are ready to try something more interesting.”  Supernauts is a persistent virtual world sandbox game where players can create their own puzzles, games, and hideouts.

The money for the Helsinki-based startup comes from Idinvest Partners and Playdom co-founder Rick Thompson, who has backed a number of social and mobile game startups recently.

The game is about superheroes, but it is non-violent, which means it will appeal to younger age groups. The superheroes go around the city solving problems. The title will debut simultaneously on mobile devices, the web, and Facebook. To be a true modern game, a title has to be available on the platforms where users want to play it, Pasula said.

Grand Cru was founded in May 2011 and has 11 employees. It’s headquartered in the bohemian district of Helsinki called Kallio, which has the most bars per capita in Finland. Rivals include Sony/Media Molecule (maker of Little Big Planet), Zynga (CityVille), Sulake (Habbo), Mojang (Minecraft), Roblox, and others.

Players will be able to create their own superhero or heroine and use a “zapper” to build or destroy environments block by block. They can create unique content such as virtual hideouts together. And they will be able to move to a new platform and pick up where they left off.

Pasula said the game has the same world-building features that make Minecraft so addictive, the user-generated content that makes Little Big Planet fun, real-time multiplayer, and a very approachable art style. The world is persistent and can be accessed via a web browser, from Facebook, and from mobile devices. For technology, Grand Cru is using the Unity 3D game engine on a custom C# server for the cloud.

The company’s original backer was Lifeline Ventures, which inveted in 2011. Guillaume Lautour of Idinvest Partners led the latest round. Other investors include Thompson; Nicolas Beraud, founder of Betclic; Anil Hansjee, former head of mergers and acquisitions for Google EMEA; and Henric Suuronen, former studio head of Wooga games. Finland’s public funding programs TEKES and the Nordic Game Program also provided support. Pasula said he was happy about how the funding came together.

Lautour said that Idinvest is actively looking to fund game studios in Nordic countries because of the well-known talent pool there. He heard from game industry veterans about Grand Cru and decided to reach out to them because of their reputation. He saw their demo at the time and considered it to be “really stunning” for a four-month effort. He said the technology choices made by the team were good.

Five of the founders, including Pasula, previously worked at Mr. Goodliving, a Finnish game developer, for more than six years. Real Networks, which owned the studio, closed it in 2011. Mikko Wilkman from Sulake, maker of Habbo, joined the crew to form the new venture. They got funding before they had a PowerPoint deck ready. The team conducted a lot of focus tests to find out what players really wanted in creating their own spaces within games.

Supernauts is expected to launch later this year on the web, iOS, and Android. Pasula said that he is very excited about tablet platforms such as the new iPad.

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GamesBeat 2012 is VentureBeat’s fourth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. This year we’re calling on speakers from the hottest mobile, social, PC, and console companies to debate new ways to stay on pace with changing consumer tastes and platforms. Join 500+ execs, investors, analysts, entrepreneurs, and press as we explore the gaming industry’s latest trends and newest monetization opportunities. The event takes place July 10-11 in San Francisco, and you can get your early-bird tickets here.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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The company, which debuted at the Google I/O conference last year, raised the money from Highland Capital, Greylock, Benchmark, CRV, and General Catalyst, said Michael Carter, co-founder of Game Closure.

Last year, the company launched its Popstar Defense game to prove that it could make a single game, written entirely with the HTML5 language (the lingua franca of the web), that could run on web browsers, iPhones, Android phones, Android tablets and iPads. Now it offers a Javascript game software development kit that runs on multiple devices and allows client-server code sharing. The company says it can reduce the time it takes to create game for every mobile platform from 12 months to just six weeks.

The Popstar Defense game was a typical “tower defense” game, where you had to defend rock stars on stage from getting the limelight stolen from some invading rockers. It was a multiplayer game where users can collaborate in real-time, and it used decent two-dimensional graphics. As many as 2,000 moving objects could be on the screen at the same time. The company went on to publish a couple more games to educate the team about the hurdles in developing cross-platform games.

“We continued to work hard on the technology and make it demonstrably the best in the industry,” Carter said in an interview. “Once we got to the stage where everybody in the industry saw that, we were able to raise the round.”

The company can now make tools available to other developers and take some kind of cut in return.

“The industry is going through an extremely fast transition,” Carter said. “The platforms are changing. Expectations of consumers are changing. Business models are changing. We started the company at the ideal time.”

Andy Miller of Highland led the round. He said in a statement that Game Closure has the chance to change the face of an industry.

In a statement, Carter said, “Our series A financing was very competitive and gave us the flexibility to think long and hard about which firm and partner we wanted to work with. Still, I knew Andy Miller was the perfect fit after spending just a couple of hours with him: he recently built, operated, and sold his third company, Quattro wireless; he knows the mobile space inside and out; he just left an operational position at Apple as the VP of the iADs platform; and he’s one of the smartest and most level-headed people I’ve had the good fortune to work with. “

Because Popstar Defense and other games were written in HTML5, there was no need to download a plug-in to run them in a compliant browser such as Google Chrome. The game used the same code across platforms, so a developer didn’t have to do a different version for every new device. Users could send out simple web links to invite other players to join the game.

That’s something that the current generation of Facebook games don’t allow. With Game Closure, developers can write in pure JavaScript and then use standard HTML5 applications programming interfaces. Game Closure’s software development kit can compile, deploy and accelerate the game on a specific device. When the game runs on non-browser platforms like a mobile phone, Game Closure turns to native app technology such as OpenGL. That’s important in order to get a game to run at a much faster speed than is possible with HTML5.

It’s similar to the game plan of Sibblingz, which is also creating a cross-platform game development technology. The technology was created by Carter, Martin Hunt and Tom Fairfield. All of them have background at game and web startups such as Meebo. After the company first announced the beta technology in February, more than 7,000 developers approached Game Closure. Game Closure got its start in the StartX student-led incubator for startups created by Stanford University students and graduated in the spring of 2011.

Game Closure has grown from three employees at its start a year ago to more than 26 engineers. The company plans to double in size in the next six months. Game Closure has stepped in where an earlier firm, Moblyng, failed. After laboring for years, Moblyng shut down in December.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Just a year ago, the company said in a filing it had raised about $7.5 million of a $10.9 million round, but it was simply a follow-on funding to its previous round. Stewart Putney (pictured right), believed that HTML5 games were going to become predominant on mobile devices in the future. The benefit was that developers could create games once and have them run on a wide variety of devices as well as on social networks and the web. For users, such games meant that they could play a game on one device and challenge another player playing the same game on another platform.

But Putney confirmed in an email that the company has shut down and the staff of 20 employees has been laid off.

“We did not monetize enough to stay in business,” said Putney.

Redwood City, Calif.-based Moblyng was founded as FlipTrack in 2007, porting Flash slide shows to mobile operating systems. But it changed its plan to help developers quickly port their mobile games to other operating systems. Then it focused on making HTML5 games on social networking sites and mobile devices.

HTML5 is seen as a large competitor for Flash, which most casual games are built on. Most websites that host videos also use Flash to play them. But Flash is lacking on some mobile devices — most notably the iPhone and iPad — while HTML5 is available in most mobile browsers.

HTML5 is viewed as the lingua franca of the web, a protocol for creating software that can run on web sites, mobile phones, and social networks. But in games, HTML5 has had mixed results, since many games in HTML5 run slow.

Moblyng had alliances with Playdom and Lolapps, but it had more success creating its own games that could run in a cross-platform manner, where a player could log into a game on Facebook and play against someone on a mobile phone or the web. The company’s site says it has more than 10 million downloads.

Putney said the games have gotten traction, but too late. The company launched its HTML5 games on the Facebook HTML5 mobile platform in mid-October, but the audience started growing in December when time and cash had run out.

“I am very proud of the work we did, the HTML5 games are still live and we have a growing base of active users,” Putney said. “I remain very confident HTML5 will be a great platform for social games and media, it is simply a question of when. We just unleashed a group of kick-ass HTML5-focused professionals into the market, so my hope is they will help the HTML5 ecosystem develop that much faster.”

Moblyng’s investors include Mohr Davidow Ventures and Deep Fork Capital. The company also received another $500,000 from unnamed angels. A variety of other HTML5 game makers out there, such as Game Closure and Sibblingz, which have also created tools for building cross-platform HTML5 games.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Spil Games says the future of mobile social gaming will be in the browser not in “native” apps written for a particular kind of mobile hardware, such as Apple’s iPhone. Browser-based games can run across platforms and allow players to play on any platform they want. By introducing social features to browser games, Spil Games is making the browser platform more attractive.

Currently, most mobile games are native games, since that allows them to run as fast as possible and take advantage of specific features of a phone’s hardware. But Spil Games is supporting HTML5, the new proposed format for the lingua franca of web applications. Spil Games first announced its support for HTML5 in August, 2010, and it has promoted HTML5 game development through a monthly contest. The company was also early in coming out with browser-based mobile versions of all of its web sites starting last September.

The Spil Games mobile platform will let users update their social network status with their game achievements and save their high scores. Developers can implement these social features, typically seen only on PC games or app-based platforms, into their browser-based mobile social games. Developers can also write their apps once and have them run on multiple devices, saving on development costs.

Peter Driessen (pictured left), chief executive of Spil Games, talked about the new features for the first time at the GamesBeat 2011 conference in San Francisco today. HTML5 games allow developers to update and improve their games instantly, without going through an approval process. And they allow mobile users to play games on whatever device they choose.

The Hilversum, Netherlands-based company has 130 million unique visitors a month for its web and mobile games. It has more than 4,000 online games that have been developed either internally or through relationships with third-party developers. Those games are available on girl-oriented sites such as GirlsgoGames.com, Agame.com, and Gamesgames.com. Spil games is present on social networks through its Zapapa game application.

Spil Games was founded in 2004 and has 300 employees. Investors include Van den Ende & Deitmers.