PORTALARIUM PORTAL SHOWN TO DEVELOPERS

Portalarium, a new game developer and publisher startup is wasting little time in making its mark on the fast growing social network gaming space. Led by game design pioneer Richard Garriott and a team of fellow ORIGIN and NCsoft veterans, the Austin, Texas based company is quickly rolling out its innovative web browser plug-in, The Portalarium Player, to game developers looking to create premium game experiences on social network platforms such as Facebook and MySpace.

The Player permits games developed on a wide variety of game engines and technologies — not just the pervasive Adobe Flash platform — to run seamlessly inside of the major social networks. The Portalarium Player already is running Portalarium’s first published product, Sweet @$! Poker, which is launching commercially this week.

“As a game developer for more than 20 years, I was disappointed in the performance of games on the social networks,” says Portalarium’s Director of Technology, Stephen Nichols. “We created the Portalarium Player to work with any engine developers want to use, licensed or proprietary. It will handle installation, patching and rendering all without suffering the performance hit you currently find on these networks.”

The Portalarium Player is currently only available for the Windows operating system, but a Macintosh version is in development. All major browsers including Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera are supported. But perhaps best of all, Portalarium is giving away The Portalarium Player for free to the development community in the spirit of the OpenPlay movement.

“We know that traditional game developers are looking for opportunities to jump right in to this incredibly fast growing market sector,” states Nichols. “With The Portalarium Player, they can do that. They now have the tools they need to bring the high quality game environments they’ve created on computers or video consoles to an entirely new audience on Facebook and other social networks…an audience that now numbers in the hundreds of millions of users.”

More information about Portalarium can be found at http://www.portalarium.com.