GameSalad adds cloud features with Together Games acquisition

Today, GameSalad announced that it has acquired cloud-based mobile game service provider Together Games, bringing much of its functionality to the GameSalad drag-and-drop game engine. The Together Platform offers achievements, leaderboards, text chat, and asynchronous multiplayer. The asynchronous multiplayer functionality is already implemented in the latest build of GameSalad, with the other features, including social network integration and push notifications, appearing in "coming months." Once it all goes in, the company tells Gamasutra that requests from the user-base for GameSalad will shape the roadmap for what functionality comes in next. "Now, GameSalad is evolving into an end-to-end solution for not only creating games, but also managing them via the cloud. Multiplayer is the first step in that solution as we lay the foundation for additional cloud services," said GameSalad CEO Steve Felter in a statement. GameSalad is an easy-to-use, drag-and-drop mobile game development engine that allows users to rearrange elements to create games. It also supports templates -- some of which have become surprisingly successful games. Till now, however, it has not had built-in support for common mobile game functions -- which a GameSalad spokesperson says was because the company was waiting for a solution "that would fit into our accessible, code-free paradigm." Despite its simplicity, the platform has powered three games that have hit the number one download position in the U.S. iOS App Store -- Red Bouncing Ball Spikes (as detailed at the link above, when it was number two), Flying Cyrus, and Escape 3D: The Bathroom. GameSalad tells Gamasutra that over 750,000 developers have adopted its platform so far, which offers both free and paid versions. The GameSalad tool supports a variety of target platforms, including iOS, Android, Windows 8, Mac, and popular e-readers. It also offers an HTML5 implementation for cross-platform play. “Together Games and GameSalad are philosophically aligned in the mission of making game development accessible to everyone," Together Games CEO Dustin Clingman said in a statement alongside the announcement.