Mobile game marketing platform PlayHaven is opening up its platform to allow third-party services to integrate into its real-time monetization and engagement dashboard. Essentially what PlayHaven is doing is making partnerships with several other mobile utility services to give a boost in functionality to its dashboard and the iOS game developers that use it.
The first round of partners includes Tap.me, Telesocial and PressOK PlacePlay. The PlayHaven Self-Serve Marketplace will allow iOS developers to use tools from these companies through the PlayHaven SDK, tied to the company’s back-end development stack. It is an astute move by PlayHaven, enabling game developers to move more quickly and engage more users in meaningful ways.
If recent history has shown us anything, the best way for mobile development companies to grow is to make partnerships. That has been the goal of Urban Airship, one of the fastest growing mobile tool providers in the ecosystem. It partnered with SimpleGeo before acquiring it and has had several other partnership announcements in the past year, with a few more on the horizon.
There are a couple of ways to add functionality and grow a core business without either A) building it in-house or B) spending money to acquire the utility. The first is to partner, as we are seeing PlayHaven do here. The second is to build a data driven platform with some type of critical mass, release an API and let the community build on top of it. A good recent example of that principle can be seen with RunKeeper.
What do these new partners bring to PlayHaven’s dashboard and SDK? Telesocial is a free API for making in-app voice calls and leaving in-app messages. The notion is to bring mobile voice to the social Web. It benefits from PlayHaven by being provided an inroad to the vast expanse of iOS games.
Image: Telesocial
Tap.me is an in-app game advertiser and engagement engine. It provides ad content to sponsor certain aspects of a game, like timed access to a virtual goods. It is similar to PlayHaven except that PlayHaven’s dashboard focuses on in-app functions as opposed to ads. If PlayHaven were to have an acquisition target down the road (or vice versa), Tap.me might be a great partner for them.
PressOK Entertainment provides PlacePlay, a solution for placing hyper-local banner ads. It is a location layer to advertising that has proven to be more effective than the spray-and-pray technique of mobile ad buys.
iOS Game developers: are you using the PlayHaven real-time marketing and monetization engine? How has it been working for you? Are you more likely to tap into PlayHaven’s SDK and dashboard now that it has several new partners providing functionality? Let us know in the comments.
