A new Whirled?

I get a lot of press releases, and while I read them all, I rarely spend the time to post an entire entry about a single one. Sometimes though, something special arrives and I feel the need to investigate it and tell you guys what I have found.

Whirled (www.whirled.com) opened its doors today. I had not heard of it until the press release arrived. At first glance, Whirled seems like it might be just another attempt to monetize the MMO universe (and it is). It is more than that though. Whirled allows game developers to earn money by applying the Whirled API to their games and uploading them to the server. I know, that doesn’t sound overly unique at face value, but hear me out. Whirled is attempting to give game developers an almost XBox Live style system to compliment their Flash games. Not just achievements, chatting, and other features common to the Xbox Live experience (and other web gaming portals), but also the ability to sell premium content to users of your games.

Whirled players earn coins that can be spent on in-game items for their rooms, but can also buy “bars” via multiple mediums (gift cards, Pay Pal, etc) that translate into real world currency which can be used to buy games and other items from the shop. Content Providers earn BLING when a user purchases their content from the shop. Bling can be turned into cash money by the content providers. It sounds interesting, and they have a nice little line up of games and developers so far. Also, supposedly there is a LIFETIME rev share for referrals to the world. I looked for a way to embed a code or a game into this blog to test out the referral system and was able to find one for the brilliant VectorOids game that would fit our site perfectly.

http://www.whirled.com/clients/world-client.swf

Launch the full version of Whirled

There is an entire Wiki available with the full source to all of their internally developed games, etc. There are also game development contests and other goodies. It sounds promising. Whirled was created by threerings, creators of the very successful Puzzle Pirates.