Mytopia hopes to open its digital game community to users of Xbox...

“right at the beginning” of discussions to bring the community to home console and handheld videogame systems, she said, predicting that will take at least “a couple of months” to become a reality. Until now the Mytopia game community has been available online only in beta form, open to users of Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, hi5 and Friendster. But the company said Wednesday at the CTIA Wireless I.T. & Entertainment show in San Francisco that the game community soon will be available via iPhone, BlackBerry, Symbian, PalmOS, Windows Mobile and other mobile devices. For the first time, Mytopia members from social networks, widget communities, mobile devices and “every smartphone operating system will be able to seamlessly play games and chat together in real-time,” it said. The game community will be embedded on various mobile devices worldwide, with initial release on the complete smartphone catalog of wireless telecom service provider Orange Israel, it said. The Mytopia community is a virtual world incorporating casual games and social features. Games offered now are all internally-developed, but Ben-Artzi said the goal is to make third-party titles available as well via licensing. Games at the Web site include bingo, chess and poker. Players earn silver and gold “nuggets,” the Mytopian currency, and can “cash out” winnings for virtual and actual prizes in the company online shop, it said. The community features real-time connectivity. Mytopia Mobile will enable the company to explore new business models, Ben-Artzi said. Mytopia has been free-to-play on the Web but will charge for mobile game play, either a monthly fee of about $9.99 or a la carte game purchases at about $7.99 to $14.99 per title, Ben- Artzi said. The new business model will free Mytopia of its reliance on ads, which can interfere with the user’s immersive online game session, the company said. The game community is powered by a Real Time Universal Gaming System (RUGS), the company’s patent-pending “write once, run anywhere” framework that it said “enables users to play classic games together in real-time from any device or network.” The technology emerged in-house after the company tired of spending 60 to 70 percent of its resources porting games among platforms, said Ben-Artzi. The technology eliminates the “fragmentation” that complicates bringing a game from one device to another, she said. Mytopia was started in 2005 by Ben-Artzi and her older brother, Guy Ben- Artzi. The company raised $1.5 million in initial funding from unspecified investors, it said. So far, it’s drawn about 850,000 users, with concurrent users at times numbering 2,000, she said. Those gamers have visited the site without seeing a single ad promoting it, but the company plans to advertise after expanding to mobile devices, she said. To date, it’s generated revenue but Ben-Artzi wouldn’t say how much. The company expects to become profitable in early 2009, she told us.