Activision Blizzard is joining the likes of Gree and DeNA by creating its own mobile social gaming platform, Activate, which will be used in all of the publisher's mobile titles starting next month.
The first games to integrate Activate will be two upcoming iOS editions of the company's phenomenally popular
Skylanders franchise,
Skylanders: Lost Islands and
Skylanders: Battlegrounds. It intends to drop Activate into its previously released games and all titles going forward,
according to Inside Mobile Apps.
It's unclear yet whether Activision will allow releases it's not publishing to use Activate, but it would be competing against existing platforms like Gree's self-titled network, DeNA's Mobage, and even Apple's Game Center if it decided to take that route.
And Activision isn't the only major console game publisher to create a mobile social network -- Electronic Arts already offers its Origin platform in the mobile games it's published, and has already picked up over 9 million registered mobile users. Ubisoft
also has an Origin-like platform, though it's PC-only so far.
The Activate platform enables developers to offer friends lists, leaderboards, achievements, invites, and cloud storage features so players can access their saved progress on multiple devices. It will allow people to login with their Facebook accounts, and users will need to register for an account in order to use the online modes in Activate-supported games.
