SGN, whose games have been downloaded a staggering total of over 12 million times, last week announced their initial foray into the now crowded arena of community gaming systems. While this first release only includes a method for a profit sharing driven cross-promotion of apps between companies, Jeff Weiser who heads up their cross promotion platform admits they have reason to investigate expanding their third party platform offerings.

The cross-promotion platform that SGN announced is all based on a revenue sharing model. They have excess inventory of promotion space in their apps, many of which are MMO type games like Mafia: Respect and Retaliation and Agency Wars. SGN’s MMO games have a very devoted user base with some users playing for multiple hours per day. This large amount of time per player leads to a large number of in-game ad views. To help alleviate ad numbness, they are opening up their in-game ad system to cross promotion with other application developers.

The developers announced thus far include Punch Entertainment and Smallmedium.

SGN will run ads for these third party games for free, if a user clicks on one of the links and buys the application in the App Store, the revenue from the sale will be split evenly between SGN and the third party.

Users have incentive to purchase the application due to the reward of receiving some a bonus in the SGN application. For instance they might get 50 reputation points in Mafia. This incentive will help drive devoted players of the SGN games to get these applications through the SGN application as they will get more, in the end, than purchasing directly through the App Store.

SGN also has a very well built out network gaming system that spans not only their mobile games, but their games on social networks like Facebook. Their system is mature and already has millions of users. We expect to see them utilize their position and open this network to other developers in the future. Though this is only my gut feeling, the company has yet to announce anything other than their cross-promotion system.

About SGN

SGN, Social Gaming Network, is the largest developer of social and mobile games. SGN’s current network of games commands over 12 million downloads of its suite of games on the iPhone and iPod Touch and more than one million game players per day across multiple social networking platforms including Facebook, MySpace, Bebo.
http://sgn.com

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