Hot on the heels of its $14 million venture capital win last week, hi5 has announced the launch of their new Developer Portal. The portal will allow developers to quickly and easily integrate their titles with one of the world’s largest social entertainment websites. Following the launch of their Game Developer Program in March, hi5 has opened up new viral marketing channels for developers - providing options where other networks like Facebook have taken them away. Today’s launch marks the next step in hi5’s attempt to make it easy for developers to distribute and monetize their best games.
“With the release of our new developer portal and support for Facebook-compatible APIs, it is now nearly frictionless for developers to publish their games in our network." said hi5 President Alex St. John. “As of today, anybody who has made the investment to create a social media game is simply throwing money away if they don't publish it on hi5 as quickly as possible. It’s virtually effortless.”
hi5 is committed to developers and has “invested in creating innovative new hooks for promoting their content.” Developers can now access hi5’s Virtual Goods and Gifts API in addition to the pre-existing Payments API. These APIs will “enable third-party games to provide gifts and other virtual goods to users, which persist on user profile pages and trigger the viral channels that get new content discovered.”
“hi5's new Developer Portal will enable us to integrate our games with their virtual goods economy and viral marketing channels quickly and easily,” said Sneaky Games CEO David Godwin. “By working with hi5, we'll be able to reach millions of users worldwide who enjoy playing social games and engaging with virtual goods.”
“We're enthusiastic about working with hi5 to further promote and monetize our games through their innovative distribution platform,” said Heiko Hubertz, CEO of Bigpoint. “The close partnership will support our long-term strategic growth initiatives by helping us introduce new audiences to our top-performing games.”
The Developer Portal lets developers access “API documentation (both OpenSocial and Facebook-compatible interfaces) for all integration points, sample source code, reference guides on promoting and monetizing games on hi5, revenue share terms, and distribution agreements.” Developers can submit games and applications for hi5 review and manage all existing content all in one place. hi5 is showcasing the new portal at Casual Connect Seattle, from today until July 22.
