To date, most games on mobile devices, especially for the iPhone, have been stand-alone applications that are distributed through a centralized point, like Apple’s App Store. MocoSpace, a mobile social network wants to provide an alternative, MocoSpace Games, on its own platform.

MocoSpace claims 12 million users and has been in operation for several years, so it’s hardly an unknown. The company appears to have been fairly successful at creating an online community that is, for the smaller number of mobile web users, somewhat proportionate to regular web counterparts like MySpace.

So it’s interesting that the company is mirroring web social networks like MySpace and Hi5 in turning to games. At the moment, it says it has a million users of its available single-player games, but the new focus is to be on virally spread social games.

Any new games available on MocoSpace — the first of which, pictured at right, will be available in July — will forgo downloads, being available instead through the mobile browser.

This isn’t the first we’ve heard of browser-based games for mobile; the new Android build, Froyo, is supposed to handle Flash well, which would mean that thousands of casual and social games would suddenly become viable on mobile devices.

The problem is that app downloads actually work quite well, especially for Apple. But Android’s store has so far been panned by some developers, so it’s possible that browser-based games could gain a foothold on that platform.