Inside Social Games

It is never too surprising to see another mafia-themed RPG. However, Moblyng, a California based games company, just released the latest in text-based social RPGs with its title, m: Vampire. As expected, the game is free to play, making its revenue off the sale of virtual currency and goods.

But that isn’t the real story here. The game is actually available across many platforms, including the Nokia 5800, Nokia N97, Android, iPhone, iPod Touch, Palm Pre, and Facebook. In addition to the wide range of releases, players will actually be able to interact and challenge each other regardless of what they play on.

“As the leader in cross-platform social games, we’re excited to release m:Vampire as the first blood-sucking title to span multiple devices,” said Stewart Putney, CEO and founder of Moblyng Games. “We recognized the popularity of the vampire genre and wanted to allow as many players as possible to connect and share their gaming experience on a variety of social gaming platforms.”

As it is a “mafia” game, m: Vampire has players create an avatar and complete dark missions to level up and grow more powerful. As expected, missions can be done until your stamina runs low and are limited by level, required items, and the number of friends in your “coven.” Despite the fact that we have seen this game before, it is unique in respect to its significant cross-platform interaction.

Though there are mobile games using elements such as Facebook Connect already, m: Vampire will be one of the first games to run on this many platforms and still have players interacting together. Currently, Vampire is only available on Facebook and Android, but according to the company, it is utilizing the software used in previous titles such as Dungeon Quest and m: Mafia. This means that porting this particular game only really takes a couple of days.

Though text-based RPGsare a bit overdone, m: Vampire’s cross platform playability could very likely add the hook Moblyng needs to succeed in the social space. Moreover, the fact that it is launching on the smaller but quickly growing Android grants the game developers the opportunity to be the first to not only have microtransactions but the first to have a “mafia” type game for the mobile platform.