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Social gaming that has won our hearts and minds, on platforms such as Facebook, have started their migration into the palms of gamers around the world as iMob online has been launched and is set to take the world by storm – starting with the iPhone.

Mob Wars has amassed a huge gathering (two and half million players worldwide) and brings in monthly revenues of no less than $1 million  - the game is a clear success.  Well now it seems that the creators of the game have decided to break the cash cow out of its Facebook farm (metaphorically speaking) and let it loose on a possibly much larger audience through the AppStore.  However the developers of the game have to decided to play around with the name, calling the iPhone version iMob Online, the move clearly being an ironic slant about how everything attached with Apple is now authorised to place a lower case ‘I’ in front of everything.

The iPhone version of the game allows the player to have a play with the game as well as using features like GPS functionality and the all important real time messaging.  What’s even better for all you budding mobster wannabes out there is that the game is absolutely free although you can always bribe your way up the ladder by buying ‘respect point’ packages through the AppStore.

However, this ability to pay your way up the game will upset those gamers who aren’t interested in spending money on what they consider should be a free game.  A user can spend as little as 59 pennies to gain 10 respect points or as much as £11.99 for 400 respect points.  It starts to get a little bit redundant when your trying to enjoy playing a game but get your bottom kicked by “Mr Moneybags” who just bought 12,000 points.

However, this shouldn’t set the social gaming idea taking off.  Many are expecting the social gaming scheme to either fall flat on its face in 2009 while others are expecting it to make a seamless migration onto the more mobile consoles – the iPhone and the AppStore being one of the best ways to crack the market.

One man who is behind the social gaming revolution whole heartedly is Mark Pincus, the founder and CEO of Zynga who were responsible for bringing the Live Poker game to the iPhone by allowing users to gain access to the game by using their Facebook login details using the Facebook Connect technology.

Pincus has faith in the iPhone-Social Gaming collaboration, saying, “The iPhone has most of the components to be one of the most important social gaming platforms. It has ease of access through the App Store, where games are even more accessible than on a social network. It’s social, and it connects online easily. And, of course, it’s always with you, so the games are always available for you to play. We believe social games will penetrate the iPhone more than any other platform.”

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 15th, 2009 at 9:09 pm and is filed under Game Development, Gaming, iPhone. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.