{"id":896,"date":"2010-03-30T00:20:15","date_gmt":"2010-03-29T23:20:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vhirsch.com\/blog\/2010\/03\/30\/orange-uk-on-gaming-offensive\/"},"modified":"2010-03-30T00:37:32","modified_gmt":"2010-03-29T23:37:32","slug":"orange-uk-on-gaming-offensive","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vhirsch.com\/blog\/2010\/03\/30\/orange-uk-on-gaming-offensive\/","title":{"rendered":"Orange UK on Gaming Offensive"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"The UK arm of Orange<\/a>, the France Telecom-owned operator that is merging with T-Mobile’s UK<\/a> bit, today offered a lot of news on the mobile games side. They made an announcement<\/a> on the introduction of not less than 3 different gaming services that they will be launching over the next couple of weeks:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Playtomo is a social gaming service to be used within the users’ social networks (e.g. Facebook; no others were mentioned). Users can download the app (?) from Orange’s portal and then share scores etc on the social network of choice. It sounds a little like a “posh Facebook Connect” solution (and this is not meant derogatory at all!). Friends can be invited from any UK network operator.<\/li>\n
  2. Games Zone is a subscription-service where “just” \u00a35 per month buy you two games and a 20% discount on all others. It also offers “exclusive competitions”.<\/li>\n
  3. The third offering is a little unclear to me: Orange will launch the aptly called “Orange iPhone Games” offering, which will feature games that are “designed specifically or published by Orange for iPhone customers”. They say it will include a variety of game genres as well as the aforementioned Playtomo. Now, this one, I am not sure about… Orange clearly looks to bolstering their brand (or, perhaps, use their brand as a lever to lift otherwise unbranded games into the limelight) but this seems like a tough proposition. It is an interesting one, too, though as it would seem the first time an operator steps into the ring as a publisher amongst many. Watch this space…<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    The really uplifting thing about this is that Orange clearly recognises the significance of games to their overall offering and playful interaction is – as I have often pointed out – likely to be a driver for interaction between people in the mid- and long-term.<\/p>\n

    Finally: do you think this gives any hint as to which brand will survive the merger of the Orange and T-Mobile UK operations? \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    The UK arm of Orange, the France Telecom-owned operator that is merging with T-Mobile’s UK bit, today offered a lot of news on the mobile games side. They made an announcement on the introduction of not less than 3 different gaming services that they will be launching over the next couple of weeks: Playtomo is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[756],"tags":[52,1350,107,206,398,404,820,494,599,626],"class_list":["post-896","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-756","tag-app-store","tag-apple","tag-carriers","tag-facebook","tag-mobile-content","tag-mobile-games","tag-mobile-web","tag-orange","tag-social-networks","tag-t-mobile"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paSwZv-es","jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vhirsch.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/896","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vhirsch.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vhirsch.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vhirsch.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vhirsch.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=896"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/vhirsch.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/896\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":897,"href":"https:\/\/vhirsch.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/896\/revisions\/897"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vhirsch.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=896"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vhirsch.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=896"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vhirsch.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=896"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}