Star Arcade – A New Mobile Social Gaming Community (Also Free Games!)

I came across a company called Star Arcade at the recent Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. They were nestled next to the Rovio Mobile booth and given that they had arcade in their company name I thought I’d have a bit of a chat to them.

Star Arcade, like Rovio Mobile are a Finnish company that specialise in games for mobile phones. Their aim is to create games that are fun to play against other people including your friends regardless of device, operator or location. They have games available to download and play right now for 3 mobile phone online stores: Apple’s App Store, Goggle’s Android Market and Nokia’s Ovi. The majority of games are free too, with only a few costing between 1 – 1.50 GBP to download.

Our mobile social gaming community is aimed at the “next billion” gamers from developing markets who have the desire to play games but do not own the most expensive devices or always have access to high speed broadband services.” – Jonne Castrén Vice President, Star Arcade.

Their simple matchmaking system allows you to play against anyone in the world with ease. Just press the onscreen play button and the system then goes off to find you an opponent. It’s that easy. All your scores are recorded too as well as who you were playing against.

The system has been in beta for the past 3 months or so with all the games listed below. I did have a bit of trouble on a few occasions finding people to play against. Even so, without any publicity Star Arcade has already attracted many thousands of registered users, which is pretty impressive.

Here’s a list of the free games currently available:

Apple App Store:

• Tic Tak Toe
• Star Diamonds Capture

Ovi Store:

• Tic Tak Toe
• Star Diamonds Capture
• Star Mancala
• Indoku (FREE)
• Ultimate Alien Pinball (FREE)

Android Market:

• Tic Tak Toe
• Star Diamonds Capture
• Star Mancala

Now that Star Arcade have officially launched there should soon be a lot more people online to play against. They are also planning on regularly releasing new games so keep an eye on their website to see when these become available. You can also follow Star Arcade on Twitter and on Facebook.

Update 15th March 2011: Added links to Star Arcade’s Twitter account and Facebook page.

Screenshots:

Star Arcade games are available now from the Apple app store, Android market and the Ovi store.