Inside Social Games

What has over 2.5 million monthly players, makes revenues of over $1 million a month, and is akin to the criminal underworld? The answer is Mob Wars, and this Facebook and MySpace title has spawned a cottage industry of copycats that is now expanding its reach beyond the social networks and into the mobile world. That’s right, Mob Wars has a new iPhone equivalent called iMob Online, developed by Addmired.

Though a mobile version, this app keeps a lot of the features Mob Wars players are familiar with. It is still text based, you still take jobs, earn money, and work your way up to that wonderful crime boss you always dreamed of being.

The best news though, is that the game is free. The only thing that costs anything are little, optional “respect point” packages that you can buy from the App Store. Of course, this isn’t something unfamiliar to long time Facebook RPG players, as most RPG titles allow the player to purchase some sort of “currency” for real money to get extra bonuses in game.

Being a new game, however, means that it is going to have a few new toys to play with as well. This rendition makes use of some of the iPhone’s technological capabilities and incorporates a nifty location-aware system that will let you scan for other iMob Online players nearby, allowing you to either join forces or duke it out. That considered, future versions of this game could make for some rather interesting game features that could possibly integrate reality into game play. What if locations in game represented locations in your town? What if you could physically move about your town using GPS and have that affect the game? What if entering another town (say if you are traveling) can affect your home town? Food for thought.

Beyond the location usage, the game also includes your classic Mob Wars social features. Most already know them by heart, but such features are your standard chat, leaderboards, and in some cases news feeds. Nothing to brag about, but chances are people would complain if they weren’t there; which more or less means that such features are an expectation for anything considered a “social game.”

Nevertheless, iMob Online looks pretty cool and is certainly a must have for any hardcore Mob Wars players. Hopefully, this means the world will begin to see more popular RPGs port to the iPhone. It would be great if the mobile versions connected to the originals via Facebook Connect – for all the Mob Wars addicts out there, something like that would be a godsend.

[via PoketGamer]