Plans games for XBLA and WiiWare

Jul 25, 2008 07:21 GMT  ·  By

Casual game publisher extraordinaire Majesco says that it is planning to make a move to Facebook, in an effort to broaden its portfolio of games and to attract a bigger audience. It has chosen developers Rocketbowl and the Shapshot Studio of Large Animal Games to create Bananagrams. The game, due for an August release, will be made available to interested players via social networking platform Facebook, in the form of a widget.

Majesco has made a name for itself on the Nintendo Wii and on the Nintendo DS markets, where it launched games like Cooking Mama and other casual titles, easy to pick up and play and with interesting scenarios. The company recently announced that it was trying to expand the scope of its business, moving first to the PC, with Orchard, a game that aims to put the player in control of the destiny of a neglected orchard, and now with the Facebook maneuver.

It also seems that there are talks within the company about creating games and ports of games that will target the WiiWare service from Nintendo and the Xbox Live Arcade from Microsoft. No clear plans have been announced regarding the two platforms.

The Bananagrams Facebook widget will be free, ad supported and will allow players to play both single player matches and enter multiplayer contents in which up to eight persons can take part. The focus of the game is to create as many interconnected words as possible with the tiles the player has on hand.

Gui Karyo, who is the operations vice president at Majesco, talked about the new move, saying that "casual gaming applications have exploded on social networking sites like Facebook and Bananagrams is an ideal fit for the demographic. With its fast-paced action and addictive but simple gameplay, we believe this game has potential to become one of the most popular gaming applications on the site".

What do you think, Softpedia readers, is this a threat to Scrabulous?