EA’s Pogo takes casual games into mobile sphere with iPhone launch

After a long prep period, video game giant Electronic Arts is launching its first Pogo game on the iPhone tomorrow.

Pogo.com has been around as web site for casual gamers since 1998. EA bought the company in 2001 and has built it into a popular casual game site with 5 million unique monthly visitors. Now the company is launching an iPhone app that is integrated with the web site. The integration is what took a long time to do, and it is the integration that could help set this site apart from other casual mobile game portals. EA has been careful to replicate the Pogo web experience on the iPhone.

For other big brand companies, this is the wave of the future. Gone are the days when game companies could create a Facebook app, a web app, and a mobile app that didn’t talk to each other. When you are dealing with a multi-platform brand, the game experience should be integrated across the platforms.

EA has done that. If you’re a member of Pogo.com, you can sign up for the iPhone app and view your web account stats. You can see your friends, challenges and leaderboards. If you play a game on the iPhone, your results can be incorporated into Pogo’s own web stats.

“We’re taking Pogo from a consumer web experience and taking it to where consumers are,” said Michael Marchetti, senior vice president and general manager of EA’s Pogo division. “We want Pogo to be a classic casual gaming brand that can travel across platforms.”

EA also said yesterday that its Poppit! game, one of the popular Pogo titles, will be available on the Chrome Web app store as well. Pogo games are also already available on Facebook. On the iPhone, EA will make five Pogo games available: Word Whomp, Turbo 21, Poppit! (pictured at top), Sweet Tooth 2, and Mahjong Safari. The Pogo app is free and ad-supported. If you want to turn off ads, you have to pay a one-time $2.99 fee. If you are already a premium subscriber to Club Pogo, the iPhone ads are turned off automatically.

Marchetti said that EA couldn’t bring Pogo to phones before because it require richer graphics capability. The iPhone, however, is perfectly capable of displaying such graphics. It took about nine months because it isn’t easy to create the verification system which authenticates the Pogo identity. When you activate the Pogo app, you can choose among the games and tap to initiate one. As more Pogo games are launched, EA can add them to the Pogo iPhone app window.

The social layer of the Pogo community should help the games spread. On the iPhone, getting a game to be viral isn’t as easy as it is on Facebook. So the social discovery helps games get noticed and played in the mobile setting. But EA doesn’t yet have that same strategy across all of its games, mainly because of branding differences. On Facebook, for instance, you can play FIFA Superstars, a soccer game, and see a promotion for Madden NFL Superstars. But on the iPhone, you won’t see cross-brand promotions, such as Pogo recommending that you try out Need for Speed Shift or other EA Mobile games.

Overall, this sounds like the approach that will help EA’s games stand out among the tens of thousands of games on the iPhone.