Sibblingz rolls out social-game platform with Crowdstar

Sibblingz launched a social game platform today that lets publishers release games that players can enjoy on multiple game devices. One of the first game publishers to use the platform is Crowdstar, a hot Facebook game maker that is also a sister company to Sibblingz.

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If developers use Burlingame, Calif.-based Sibblingz social game engine, they can create games that can be quickly published to social networks, mobile devices such as iPhones and Android phones. Moreover, game players can communicate with friends across platforms and play across the platforms.

This kind of cross-platform game development is common in the console space. But it is complicated to do and sometimes doesn’t work that well. Sibblingz is carrying that practice into social games, where playing with friends is paramount. Sibblingz believes its platform is important because it lets friends find and play each other regardless of the platform they are using.

Besides Crowdstar, game developer Sixits is also using the Sibblingz platform. Crowdstar has already used Sibblingz to develop Happy Island, which has 12 million monthly active users on Facebook.

Peter Relan, chairman of both Sibblingz and Crowdstar, said that the Sibblingz game engine lets a developer create a game for, say, Apple’s iPad. That game can connect to the same back-end server data that is used by the Facebook version of the game. Hence, Sibblingz can connect players across platforms, while preserving the ability to make unique games that take advantage of a device’s unique features.

Relan said he believes that Sibblingz’s platform will also save developers millions in game-development costs and improve their ability to launch games quickly and reach the broadest possible audience. Sibblingz estimates that cross-platform games can be launched within three months of an initial game launch. Sibblingz also lets companies monetize games that are available for free to gamers. That’s because it has a built-in virtual currency and virtual goods system, where players pay real money to buy extra virtual goods such as better weapons in a game.

Ben Savage, chief executive of Sibblingz, started work at the YouWeb incubator in 2007 and spun out as a separate company in May 2008. The company raised an angel round of funding and now has seven employees. The company completed its first version of Sibblingz at the end of last year and implemented it in Happy Island. Revenues from that deal have made Sibblingz profitable, Savage said. Typically, the company gets a split of revenue generated by a game that uses Sibblingz’s game engine.

Savage said the platform works on social games that are asynchronous, where one player moves at a time, rather than real-time shooting games with simultaneous play. There are rivals such as RealNetworks, Big Fish Games, Moblyng, Heyzap, Hi5 and others out there. But Savage said he believes that Facebook is the hot platform now and everyone wants to target it first, followed by the iPhone and then Android. The company has not yet added other social networks, in part because it relies upon Facebook Connect to get friend data.

The company has four clients, including two unannounced customers.

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