Hooked Media Group, backed by $4.5 million in funding from U.S. Venture Partners and Altos Ventures, today unveiled Yoo-Mee, a new social game platform designed to create a community of players across websites, social networks and mobile devices. From a marketing perspective, Yoo-Mee gives advertisers access to potentially 89 million gamers in the U.S. and 200 million globally.
Yoo-Mee will enable players to compete one-on-one with each other or in group tournaments. It will also track high scores, virtual currency, and social media connections so that gamers can connect with friends and top players. Two kinds of virtual currency will be used: Tokens, a "loyalty currency" that users obtain by simply playing games, inviting friends and playing with one another, and Gold, which is purchased and used in one-on-one challenges to earn real money.
The tournament aspect should prove beneficial to marketers. "By sponsoring game plays and tournaments in the Yoo-Mee network, ad messages can be pre-rolled before games start or become a sustained part of the visual frame in which the game is played and can target by demographic, content and gaming genre," explained Hooked Media. "Marketer messages will have multiple exposures because of the social media features incorporated into Yoo-Mee, such as users posting their scores and challenges to their favorite social media pages."
“We are creating a more emotionally invested experience for casual gamers. Yoo-Mee makes any game social by creating a community experience around each game,” commented Hooked Media CEO Prita Uppal. “Developers can integrate their existing games into Yoo-Mee, web publishers can embed a full game experience onto their sites, and everyone benefits from additional revenue.”
Yoo-Mee offered examples like crossword puzzles, sudoku, and other typically solitary game experiences - it can take those games and turn them into content rich, money making pages for publishers. "This creates new ways to conduct user acquisition, and brings virtual currency into the publisher revenue model where it did not exist before. Publishers will connect to their user base wherever users are engaged. Through Yoo-Mee, users directly bring their social connections back to the publisher's site to play games against their friends through social media, like Facebook, Twitter and MySpace," the company stated.
Added Rick Lewis of U.S. Venture Partners, “Social gaming is a hot market. Yoo-Mee shifts a generally solitary experience to more of a community one, so that games will become more engaging. Prita and her team have broken the boundaries of social networks and the web by bringing the fun to gamers wherever they play through a vibrant community built upon the Yoo-Mee platform, and benefiting publishers, game developers, and marketers in the process. Yoo-Mee’s introduction of a truly social and interactive gaming experience will translate into greater engagement between players and marketers.”
