At its core, Everyplay is taking the idea behind game video sites like Twitch.tv to mobile, casual gaming, with an interesting twist: Instead of getting users to record their games with dedicated capturing software, Everyplay partners with iOS game developers to add its SDK to their games.

NimbleBit’s Nimble Quest hasn’t even been released yet, but recordings of some scenes already rack up five-digit view counts on Everyplay.

20 games with Everyplay are already available on the iTunes app store. Some of them allow instant replay and sharing of key scenes, while others just continuously record a video of everything you do, ready to share at any time. Users can share these videos on Everyplay’s own website put them on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. There’s also some basic social networking functionality built into Everyplay itself.

Everyplay’s SDK is currently just available for iOS, but Laakkonen told me that his team is actively working on an Android version, which should be available soon. He also showed me a demo of an upcoming version of the SDK, which makes it possible to record the player with the phone’s front-facing camera in a kind of picture-in-picture style, which could lead to all sorts of neat meta-commentary about games.

Interesting about all of this is Amplifier’s business model for Everyplay: The company is making the SDK available free of charge, and will even provide free links to each game on Everyplay.com, allowing users to click through and install the game after they watched a video recording of it. Laakkonen stressed that this would be a great, free way to promote games, and pointed to the Paper Planes creators NimbleBit, whose videos of their upcoming Nimble Quest game have already clocked thousands of views on Everyplay.

So how will Everyplay make money? That’s where the company’s core business comes in: Finland-based Applifier started out as a Facebook game developer all the way back in 2008. Then Facebook deemphasized games in people’s stream, and the company shifted towards cross-promotion of games. That evolved into a full-blown game advertising network. Adding ads to Everyplay, which launched late last year, will be the next step. But Laakkonen said that he’s in no rush. First, he wants to build an audience for the service, and he’s already talking to some large publisher to come on board.

In the end, Laakkonen said, Everyplay is about getting back to Applifier’s roots to produce things for gamers that also help developers. Something that gets individuals excited, and doesn’t reduce them to being a data point in someone’s plan to move a lot of referral traffic. Said Laakkonen: “I am not traffic. I can’t tell you how much I hate that term.”

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Fingerprint, the company that designs mobile educational games for kids, is translating that multiplayer game experience into a family experience with the launch of new products that aim to connect kids and parents through mobile learning.

The Flying Alphabetinis is a carnival game incorporating all 26 letters of the alphabet, and will allow parents and kids (or grandparents, friends, etc.) to play each other on different devices. The Fingerprint Play platform hosts a variety of apps built for kids (similar to Disney or Nickelodian running a slate of branded shows on its channels), and Fingerprint is launching several other news games as well on Tuesday, featuring characters from popular kids franchises like Franklin & Friends, VeggieTales, and Caillou.

Fingerprint is led by Nancy MacIntyre, a former executive at Leapfrog, who launched Fingerprint Digital in September 2011 with $1.4 million in funding. A year later, the company announced additional funding that brought the total to about $7.7 million, allowing them to expand internationally and add more games to the Fingerprint lineup. In 2013, the company plans to launch 40 new titles, including those launching this week.

The company has always focused on mobile apps for both kids and parents. Previously, the company’s games allowed parents to get notifications on their child’s progress in a game and provide in-app feedback, but the multiplayer experience will now allow them to directly play with one another on different devices.

“We like the multiplayer concept because it really involves the parents and grandparents, and because it’s asynchronous so it really gives the parents the flexibility to respond when they can,” MacIntyre said. “I think it’s important but it’s also just one aspect of the whole network that we’re building.”

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There are a lot of interesting challenges in a shift like this, especially when you’re trying to provide a slick experience for Android’s enormous range of devices. Luckily, CEO Jens Begemann was more than forthcoming on the matter when I spoke to him ahead of the launch.

Meyer: How big is your push into mobile?
Begemann: At the moment a little more than half the team is working on mobile. A year ago it was 10 percent, but since then we’ve doubled our number of employees [to 250] and at the same time increased the share of people working on mobile.

You have many millions of users – how come you’re only targeting Android now?
A year ago, when we made this decision to invest heavily into mobile, we were very aware that we wouldn’t automatically be successful on mobile because we were successful on the web. Because of this, focus was extremely important. We decided to focus on one platform, and that was iOS. In the spring and summer, we saw downloads continue to grow and our new games were on the right track.

Diamond Dash is an extremely popular game – on Facebook we’ve seen 70 million people play it, and on iOS we had over 30 million downloads. We still have over 20 million active users every month, so the expectations from our fanbase are very high [regarding any new version]. We put up a page on November 21st where people could sign up for the Android version, and we have collected 850,000 email addresses.

How different was the experience, coding for Android?
You have so many devices out there, so many carriers, so many versions of Android. We don’t want to disappoint people and this has been the biggest challenge. Overall, development is obviously different for iOS than for Android, but I wouldn’t say one is easier than the other.

The amount of code we could take over from one platform to the other was relatively little. We could reuse graphics, but basically the game has been rewritten. We used Objective-C in the case of iOS and C++ on Android – it’s not such a huge difference, but because the APIs are different it was basically rewriting. This is to be expected if you don’t use something like Unity.

The biggest task in building a successful Android game is to make it run well on a large range of devices – it’s easy to make something run well on the Samsung Galaxy S III. In terms of testing, we used a mix of in-house testing and testing in the cloud. We have more than 50 devices in-house, covering a broad range of screen sizes, CPUs and GPUs, but then we use cloud-based solutions. There’s a couple of providers coming up just now, where via the internet you have remote access to devices running thousands of kilometers away. We do that currently for over 100 real devices.

So you’re covering a broad base then. How far back are you going, in terms of the Android versions you’ll support?
We set a limitation intentionally: we have said that Android 2.3 is required, and a minimum screen resolution of 320 x 480 pixels. The game would run on older devices, but we can’t ensure a good quality, and we want to make all users happy.

It used to be a truism that any developer should address iOS first. It certainly sounds like Android is a lot of work if you want to address it comprehensively, but is that offset by way in which Android is overtaking iOS by numbers? Also, there’s a bit more fragmentation of iOS itself these days, in terms of new resolutions and so on. In short, does that truism still hold?
Everybody has to make their own conclusions. Regarding fragmentation, what we see on iOS is that all the time Apple brings out new devices and OS versions, but we see that the upgrade cycle is very fast. This means devices that came out three years ago don’t need to be supported anymore and OS version that came out two years ago don’t need to be supported anymore.

For example, the iPhone 5 introduces a new screen resolution, but at the same time for new games you don’t need to support the iPhone 3GS and its non-Retina screen resolution anymore. The iOS upgrade cycle is also fast, so today it’s enough to support iOS 6 and iOS 5.

Wait – 3GS owners can run iOS 6, the latest version, but you’re still not going to support them?
For new games in early 2013, we won’t support the iPhone 3GS anymore. We want to create artwork that is really optimised for Retina, and the non-Retina market share is declining.

One other thing about iOS. It’s true you have different screen sizes, but besides that the devices behave unbelievably similarly. Some devices have the same chip – the iPhone 4S and the new iPad Mini and the iPad 2 and the new iPod Touch all have the same A5 chip. They’re virtually identical in terms of performance and RAM.

And this is something that may be relevant for Android developers. In the case of iOS, if you have an iPhone 5, that’s an iPhone 5 worldwide. With something like the Galaxy S III, internally it’s about 10-12 different models. They’re small and slight variations, but as a developer you should be aware of this fact.

So in other words, Android is still way more labor-intensive?
It depends a bit on the level of quality you’re aiming for and how broad you want to go. We try to support an awful lot of devices, so it’s a bit more work. But it’s encouraging that Google tries to standardize – the Nexus devices help.

Finally, any thoughts on being plugged into Facebook these days? Will that work the same on Android?
We obviously have experience from iOS and we don’t know how it will be on Android, but we expect it to be very similar. We have deep Facebook integration so you can see your score versus your friend’s score, and we found that makes the game much more interesting. People who log in with Facebook are about twice as active, and they monetize about nine times better – if they’re competing against their friends, they’re more likely to buy a power-up.

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The store download is available directly from Sony here and is currently limited to roughly two dozen Sony-branded Android tablets and phones. The HTC One V, S, and X are also on the list with the following caveat: “HTC mobile device owners cannot access PlayStation^®Mobile for the moment. However, we are working with HTC to ensure PlayStation^®Mobile launches as soon as possible. We will update you soon.”

Sony first tried to leverage its PlayStation brand with Android in the Xperia Play handset: An Android phone with dedicated gaming hardware controls. The handset wasn’t quite a success, but as Sony’s Jack Buser told me on stage at our Mobilize 2012 event last month, the company learned from the experience.

Instead of limiting PSP games to Sony-designed hardware now, the company has created a developer platform in tandem with other hardware partners. HTC, Fujitsu and Sharp are among the first partners. Games purchased from the Sony PlayStation Mobile store will also run on the PS Vita, Sony’s most recent mobile gaming device.

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Verizon is offering up the gaming client through its Verizon apps portal. It’s available as a free download and, after an initial free trial, the subscription fee will be charged to customers’ monthly bills.

Verizon has been gradually adding more content to its app store in an attempt to assert more control – and make more money from – its smartphone portfolio. Last month it rolled out an ambitious video search app, called Viewdini, which aggregates content from across premium content platforms such as Netflix, Hulu and Comcast’s Xfinity. The Exent deal, though, is a unique take on the carrier-developer partnership.

It’s not technically exclusive: Customers can download the app online, but it isn’t available through the Google Play store. So in addition to offering carrier-billing features to its partner, Verizon gives Exent a distribution channel that increases its chances of discovery. Verizon is surely getting compensated for that arrangement, though financial terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.

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The PlayPad and PlayPad Pro use Bluetooth as the connection and were developed in conjunction with Nvidia; that’s not surprising given Nvidia’s core competency in graphics chips as evidenced by the 12 GPU cores in Tegra 3. I literally just took delivery of a new review unit, a 7.7-inch tablet from Toshiba that uses a Tegra 3 chip,and immediately started gaming. As I saw in my review of the Asus Transformer Prime, another Tegra 3 product, graphics are smooth and detailed. But of course, I’m not seeing some of them because my hands are in the way.

The PlayPad products will alleviate that problem when they arrive, offering traditional D-Pads, analog sticks and buttons; PlayPad is a more compact version of the PlayPad Pro. Nyko hasn’t announced prices yet, but I’m already interested. My time using an Xbox 360 controller with the Transformer Prime showed that adding true gaming controls makes for a world of difference and a more console-like gaming experience. Towards the end of this video look at the Prime: you can see how enjoyable the gaming experience is with a controller.

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Mocospace, a mobile entertainment site, surveyed 15,000 users and found that 96 percent of them say they play mobile games from home, ahead of waiting for an appointment (82 percent), commuting (73 percent) and at work (64 percent). That’s not exactly surprising. We’ve heard from gaming companies that game play happens a lot in stationary places like home and work. A survey announced Wednesday from mobile game company Miniclip and ad supplier MoPub drove that point home. When given only one choice of response, 44 percent of people said they played at home, while 22 percent said they played while waiting in line, 21 percent played while traveling and 13 percent played at a restaurant.

But what’s more interesting is that the gaming at home is taking place most often in bed, according to the Mocospace survey. When given only one answer to choose from, 53 percent of home gamers said they played from their bed while 41 percent said they played in the living room, 5 percent played from their bathroom and 1 percent played from the dining table. Nokia found similar results in a survey in January, with people saying they play mobile games most often before sleeping in bed.

The Mocospace study found that 52 percent of respondents play more than one hour a day and almost a third (32 percent) play more than three hours daily including 10 percent of people who play that much while at work. The most popular mobile game category is social (62 percent), action (52 percent, puzzle (40 percent), casino style (28 percent)

The numbers show that mobile gaming is increasingly a threat to console gaming in the home. The more people play on their smartphones and tablets at home, the less time they have for dedicated gaming systems. As MocoSpace co-founder and CEO Justin Siegel said in a press release, “Mobile gaming is not a companion to consoles, but rather it’s attacking them on their home turf: the couch, the La-Z-Boy and even the bedroom.”

I think the recent surveys highlight just how personal these mobile devices are. People are on their devices right up until the time they go to sleep and as an iPass survey last year found, 43 percent of mobile workers keep their smartphones within arm’s reach when they sleep. That same survey found that 35 percent of respondents check their email in the morning before anything else, including getting dressed or eating breakfast. That means that for many people, the device is accompanying them to bed, occupying their last seconds before they fall asleep  and the first thing many reach for in the morning.

Photo courtesy of Flickr users Ben Dodson. 

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