Kabam expands social games to CNET’s Download.com

Continuing its diversification beyond Facebook, Kabam is announcing today will take four of its games to CNET’s Download.com service on the web.

San Francisco-based Kabam (it’s moving from Redwood City, Calif.) started as a hardcore game publisher on Facebook. But in the past six months, the company has aggressively expanded beyond the social network to platforms such as Kongregate.com and Google+. The company’s aim is to expand its distribution so that it can find hardcore social game players wherever they play. Download.com has more than 800,000 files available for legal download, spanning movies, music, mobile apps and games. Tens of millions of people visit the site each month.

Under the new deal, four of Kabam’s games will be available on Download.com so that they can be downloaded to a user’s computer. Then users will be able to quickly access the game via Pokki, which is a banner-like toolbar from SweetLabs that enables a player to quickly fire up an app without a browser or a social network.

The four titles include The Godfather: Five Families (pictured at top), Edgeworld, Thirst of Night, and Dragons of Atlantis. This is the first time a download portal will also offer social games as downloads.

“We want to give our users access to the full spectrum of software available, and in doing so we want to work with developers who are on the cutting edge” said Sean Murphy, vice president and general manager of Download.com. “Kabam has taken a unique position in social gaming and their partnership with Pokki has bridged a gap between the social web interface to an app that lives on your desktop.”

That, in turn, exposes the Download.com users to new types of content. Once the players download the games, they can easily and quickly call them up from the Pokki interface, which shows how many new messages are pending in the game at a glance. Pokki says it can increase the usage of an app because it makes that app so much more visible to the user.

“Kabam is excited to open a new chapter in social game distribution by introducing potentially millions of users to full-screen, desktop versions of our popular games on Download.com,” said Chris Carvalho, chief operating officer of Kabam. “The partnership with Download.com and Pokki allows us not only to reach large numbers of new players but to enhance our games by enabling even higher retention and “stickiness” because of the Pokki app’s unique qualities.”