Most mobile players are familiar with games like ‘Words With Friends’ or ‘Draw Something.’ The main reason these popular games are abandoned during play is due to the lag time in waiting for a friend to reply. So says Christopher Williams, Vice President and GM of Big Fish Free-to-Play.
Now meet “‘Match-Up! by Big Fish.’ This game solves that frustrating wait by offering mobile gamers live multiplayer matchups any time with a variety of popular casual games to chose among.”
The groundbreaking real-time, multiplayer tournament technology serving the “Match-Up!” game platform is what makes this game stand out. The servers can handle hundreds of thousands of simultaneous players in fast-paced, exciting real-time tournaments.
“‘Match-Up! by Big Fish'” is an awesome game that shows how incredibly fun and engaging real-time tournament play can be,” said Phil Gordon, founder of Jawfish Games and a world-renown poker player. “Building a scalable, lightweight synchronous tournament engine is an insanely challenging engineering problem and we’re the first to crack it.”
“Match-Up! by Big Fish” will be available in March 2013. Supported mobile platforms and included games will be announced at launch.
Through its proprietary, data-driven platform, millions of consumers seeking engaging entertainment easily discover and play PC and mobile games created by Big Fish’s network of more than 600 development partners and its in-house Big Fish Studios. The company has distributed more than 2 billion games from a growing catalog of 3,000+ unique PC games and 300+ unique mobile games, and offers cross-platform streaming games via the proprietary universal cloud gaming service, Big Fish Unlimited. Big Fish’s games are played in more than 150 countries on a wide variety of devices across 10 languages. [24×7]
Amazon Patents Gravity-Based “Pull.” Do You Feel the Tug?
Amazon has just patented a system that pulls your finger-mouse/pointer/cursor toward a link or button, just the thing to help you click links — and buy products associated with those links.
The Amazon Gravity-Based Link Assist patent fixes what happens when you inadvertently hit the wrong button or link on a touchscreen. So instead of the frustration of tapping repeatedly and still missing the link or button, what is created is a gravitational field of sorts around linkable objects that pulls the pointer toward tiny links and buttons.
Although the patent clearly benefits the Web’s largest e-tailer, (if you can’t click a link, you can’t buy a product) the online retailer (and Kindle creator) notes in its patent that the technology has accessibility potential. “Some users may lack the fine motor skills desired to operate a variety of input mechanisms due to declining health, injury, etc.,” it notes.
Until someone else files a lawsuit claiming this feature should be non-patentable since it leverages a basic Web function, like turning on a light, everyone’s favorite E-tailer will try to take ownership of everyone’s favorite law: Gravity. [24×7]
