Cafe.com featured on TechCrunch
Cafe.com has been featured on Techcrunch today!
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Extract of the Techcrunch article by Mark Hendrickson:
I’ve recently had the chance to preview two new websites that promise to significantly advance the quality of social gaming as delivered through the browser.
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The second is a site called Cafe.com by an international company called Boonty. It is intended more for casual gamers who want to use gaming more as a way to meet people and socialize online rather than compete.
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Browser-based casual gaming is nothing new (see Kongregate, the gaming networks on Facebook, and the astronomical popularity of Scrabulous in particular). But Cafe.com is the most developed social networking-gaming hybrid that I’ve seen so far, both in terms of the integration of social features and the quality of gameplay.
In contrast to InstantAction, Cafe.com will appeal to a broader audience that includes housewives and females in general (who actually make up the primary audience for online casual games). CEO Roman Nouzareth says that the target demographic is Generation X, which consists of 25-40 year olds.
The design and functionality of the site reflects that it was designed for a less “gamer” audience in mind. The tone is lighthearted and only mildly competitive. Games include pictionary, chinese checkers, Sodoku, and billiards.
As with InstantAction, the focus is on multiplayer games that can be played instantly with friends (Cafe.com bases its games primarily in Flash and HTML). But Cafe.com has also been constructed with an emphasis on member reputations and personas. Users can build out profiles with highly customizable 3D avatars (called “MiniMes”) that will be loaded into games themselves to represent characters there. As with other social networks, you can make friends with other members and message them. Nouzareth says that he wants Cafe.com to be the place where people manage their online gaming personas, while they go elsewhere to manage their more generic personas.
Virtual currency and the purchase of so-called “boosts” are particularly central to Cafe.com’s ecosystem. Members can purchase CafeCoins using real money and then use them to buy three main types of goods: attacks, defenses, and social items like virtual flowers. Gaming-specific goods can be purchased outside of gameplay and added to one’s collection for use when the time comes during gameplay. CafeCoins can also be used to buy things like new clothes for your avatar.
Two APIs are being worked on for Cafe.com: one that allows for the integration of games into the site, and one that will allow for the exporting of data elsewhere. The former is already available and being used both by the company’s own developers and by the handful of outside developers that it has worked with so far. The idea with the latter API is that users eventually will be able to export their Cafe.com profile information elsewhere, for example, to display their gaming reputations other social networking profiles.
Nouzareth says in reference to Pogo.com, one of the biggest social gaming sites in the United States: if Pogo were to have a baby with Facebook, that baby would be named Cafe.com. Grab your invitation and CafeCoins (see above) to find out yourself how that comparison holds up.
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