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Star Arcade is an ambitious company. Begun in 2010 by a group of friends hailing from Lagos, Finland and the UK, its aim is nothing less than to unify the global mobile and social gaming communities. The international team has spent the last two years working hard to provide a venue by which gamers from 180 countries can come together and enjoy interactive entertainment, regardless of their chosen platform.
Developing games that work for iOS, Android, Nokia, WP7, Blackberry, Meego/Maemo, Samsung Bada and Facebook, Star Arcade offers the things it seems most mobile and social gamers are looking for: simple, addictive games with real-time chat and lots of virtual goods. As of last year, Star Arcade games had been downloaded more then 5 million times and the company’s focus on accessibility will no doubt mean an even bigger user base in the future.
This week I caught up with Harri Myllylla, CEO of Star Arcade for a quick chat about the singular challenges facing a multi-platform mobile/social game company.
Examiner: What are the biggest challenges in creating a cross-platform social/mobile gaming platform?
HM: The biggest challenge to create cross-platform social/mobile gaming platform is fragmentation of mobile platforms. A simple task on certain mobile OS may be difficult and time consuming to implement on another platform. Another big challenge is to handle all kinds of mobile networks, long connection times and lost connections. Also, scalability of a server system is a challenge, since real-time multiplayer gaming requires a lot of processing power and network bandwidth. Being able to serve millions of users is a huge undertaking.
Examiner: How does Star Arcade facilitate cross-platform play?
HM: Cross-platform play is mostly facilitated by our server system which is quite a complex cluster of software communicating between each other and games. This is where the magic happens; load balancing, redirecting, scalability, matchmaking and game session handling to name a few.
Examiner: What’s Star Arcade’s focus? Building its own games or building relationships with external developers?
HM: Until today Star Arcade has only been developing and publishing our own games. Given the amount of requests from 3rd party developers and publishers both large and small we are considering opening up the platform to 3rd parties
Examiner: Social games are about bringing people together. How do you think Star Arcade will amplify this experience?
HM: Star Arcade is an easy way to challenge your friends or connect with new people to play games. Star Arcade fills the need of gamers both casual and more hard core to beat their friends and opponents as well as to earn bragging rights.
Examiner: Your current distribution area (according to your own information) is South America, Africa, India and the Far East. How many subscribers do you currently have?
HM: We have users from all continents but we see a lot of opportunity in the developing parts of the world. Currently we have close to one million registered users in our community.
Examiner: Are you planning to expand into North America? If so, when?
HM: We already have a good number of users in North America and our largest single market is the US.
Examiner: Star Arcade is described as mostly freemium but mentions a small fee subscription. What does the small fee mentioned on your website, get your subscribers?
HM: The premium subscribers get the games without adds and the receive virtual currency according to their subscription. In essence they get personalization features as well as advantages in the games and rankings.
Examiner: Thank you for your time. Best of luck to Star Arcade!
For more information about Star Arcade games, visit the official Star Arcade website.
![Hearts of Iron 3 [Mac Download] Hearts of Iron 3 [Mac Download]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51cj0vgdHIL._SL75_.jpg)




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In the last three months, Android accounted for 48% of smartphone purchases in the U.S. Apple’s iOS wa second at 43%. That leaves 9% to be split among the remaining competitors, and Research In Motion’s BlackBerry took 5% of that. 




