Facebook games don't come more "social" than this!
Two entrepreneurs, Brian Fudge and Michael Mikikian, co-founders of Gickup, are hoping to bring the thrill back in social gaming this time with REAL social games. They have developed a platform that facilitates the creation of multi-player video chat games where people could play OR watch. It’s similar to Google Hangouts + Youtube Live Stream.
Their partner, Propulsion Games, co-founded by TV game show producers Michael Agbabian and Dwight Smith, is launching their first game, Secret Celeb, on Facebook. Secret Celeb is a wildly addictive four player game where player’s knowledge of famous people is tested. The goal of the game is to guess as many celebrities correctly in the allotted time with your partner. The most celebrities named by a team in the allotted time wins the match. Losers get bumped off and a new team of challengers gives it a shot. The games are also broadcast where fans of the players can cheer them on or jump in the queue and challenge.
Gickup and Propulsion Games saw a gap emerging in social video broadcasting and social games. Social video broadcasters like Justin.TV, TinyChat, Ustream are great at facilitating a broadcast of user generated content but generally lack structure that would more naturally facilitate interactions with strangers. Current social games from Zynga and others, on the other hand, are a paradox because the games are not actually “social”. By adding game mechanics to video broadcasting Gickup hopes to connect people in a fun, new way, reminiscent of party games at home or classic games shows on TV.
With Gickup’s platform the production and distribution of game shows and talent based competitions is dramatically reduced. Watching streaming video online no longer needs to be a dichotomy of choice where on one end of the spectrum, there is highly produced content and on the other is unstructured, user generated content. Gickup’s new platform provides a third choice, where user generated content is produced within the confines of a game where you can be the star or just a watcher.
What’s next? Propulsion Games will be launching more games from their pipeline in the coming weeks. Meanwhile Gickup will be making its private beta SDK available soon to make it easy for any game developer to build games on Facebook, iOS and Android.
Related posts: