Inside Social Games

Social game developer socialDeck that was one of the first to create an iPhone game that could play with Facebook users. This was almost a year ago, and now, roughly 11 months later, the company is releasing the game Shake & Spell for the BlackBerry, claiming it is the first game to run across iPhone, Facebook, and BlackBerry that lets players compete against one another in real time.

In short, the game is a simple word game in which players “shake” (literally) up a bunch of letters in order to scramble them and try and spell out as many words as possible. Each day players are presented with daily challenges to complete in solo play, but the real draw is the more social leaderboard and head to head competition. The game’s Facebook and iPhone counterparts (launched last fall) have garnered over 500,000 users.

With the new BlackBerry launch, these existing players can now seamlessly interact with Blackberry players, furthering socialDeck’s notion of “anywhere, anytime, anyone” gaming.

“Shake & Spell was developed on the socialDeck social gaming platform, which lets people connect, communicate, and interact with friends across multiple mobile devices and social networks,” said Anish Acharya, socialDeck co-founder and CEO. “We’re now even closer to a truly ubiquitous and social gaming experience where it’s not about how or where the game is played, but rather with whom.”

In addition to the cross-platform capabilities, the developers also announced new viral discovery and distribution features available via the socialDeck platform through which the game was created. Currently, Shake & Spell can be shared through multiple user feeds such as Facebook, Twitter, SMS, and even email.

“The top-ranked applications featured in mobile app stores continue to get the lion’s share of downloads,” said Acharya. “The ability to cross-pollinate Shake & Spell between devices and social networking platforms means that the game can now reach new and potentially untapped audiences by driving its discovery regardless of the game’s ranking within a mobile app store.”

A full demo of the cross-platform game play can be found here.