Ubisoft Launches UbiFriends Facebook Gaming Portal

Ubisoft launched UbiFriends, a gaming portal available on social network Facebook and the first project to come out of the publisher's internal development team at its San Francisco office. The company debuted TickTock as its first title released through the platform, a free trivia game that pulls content from players' status update feeds to generate questions. In TickTock, players and their friends exchange Cherry Bombs, arming and disarming the explosives by answering multiple choice questions about each other. Ubisoft built UbiFriends on Google App Engine, which it says makes web applications "easy to build, scale, and maintain". The company plans that its future games released through the portal will encourage similar interaction with Facebook friends and users' social graphs. "We've been a leader in the art of making games for many years and we're happy to bring the Ubisoft experience to Facebook Platform," says Ubisoft's North America president Laurent Detoc. "Our first application, TickTock, is about leveraging user generated content to interact with your friends, and it's the first of many applications that we're building for our UbiFriends portal."