GameHouse Fusion is RealNetworks' recently launched social gaming platform that allows users to play titles across a variety of networks and devices (such as Facebook, mobile phones, PCs, etc.). Gamersinfo.net recently had the opportunity to talk to RealNetworks’ GameHouse division’s Assistant Vice President of Product Management Craig Robinson about Fusion’s development, functionality and impact on the industry.

Robinson has been with Real for nearly 12 years — four of which have been with the games division. He manages the game websites and game-related products, focusing recently on social and community gaming.

Gamersinfo.net: How did the idea for Fusion evolve?

Robinson: We started to look into community gaming about three years ago. At that time, A’s Pogo was the leading community site, and social gaming was nascent. We acquired a company called GameTrust that had some community gaming technology. At first we were going to launch a Pogo-like service, but as social gaming gained traction, we modified our plans to incorporate more social elements. During that process, we determined that the GameTrust technology wasn’t quite the right fit for what we wanted to do in social gaming. So we decided to build a new platform, Fusion, from scratch. We brought in some engineers that had experience building large-scale social media platforms, and they helped us launch Fusion. The motivation behind Fusion came from things we were seeing in the marketplace. We reach millions of users each month with our downloadable games from our consumer websites and syndication partners’ sites, millions on mobile, and millions on social networks. But the problem was, none of these gaming experiences or players were connected to each other in any way. Fusion was designed to address that problem — to connect players and games across devices and services.

Gamersinfo.net: What impact do you hope it will have on the industry as a whole?

Robinson: Fusion has the potential to have a significant impact on both the existing casual games industry and the emerging social games space. For the casual industry, Fusion gives traditional casual game developers access to the social space; it makes it much easier for those developers to build and distribute social games. For the social space, this means that these traditional developers (who, by the way, are some of the best game designers in the world) will be able to enter this space. This means that the overall production quality and gameplay quality of social games will improve.

Gamersinfo.net: Tell me a little bit about its technical/production lifecycle. You mentioned that engineers were brought in — where is it currently in the development process, and what kinds of quality-assurance testing and measures are in place?

Robinson: Fusion is currently in production and powering our GameHouse application on Facebook (http://apps.facebook.com/gamehouse) as well as some of our standalone Facebook games like UNO (http://apps.facebook.com/liveuno). In terms of QA, it’s pretty standard stuff: unit testing, load testing, whitebox and blackbox QA.

Gamersinfo.net: I’ve read that there will be tools in place to analyze game metrics. What kinds of information will this provide developers, and how might they use it?

Robinson: Fusion includes a rich set of services to collect and analyze game data. The system will track certain data, such as gameplays, installs, etc., by default. But it isn’t limited to that. Developers can instrument their games to track any user action within a game. This data is logged to our servers, along with player information. This will allow developers to break down the data by age, geo, gender, etc. Developers can use this information to optimize gameplay or monetization within a game. Running a social game is a lot more like running a website than a traditional game. Therefore, we’ve provided game developers with a set of analytics tools to help them optimize their games, much like you would optimize a website. Think of it as a Google Analytics for social games.

Gamersinfo.net: Facebook got a lot of attention recently for users issues with privacy controls. What privacy concerns do you think your developers/users might have, and how are they being addressed?

Robinson: We take user privacy very seriously, and we have been watching the Facebook situation closely. We certainly won’t expose any more data than Facebook does, and we will have privacy controls that allow users to set their privacy settings for things like achievement broadcasting.

Gamersinfo.net: What are some other tools and features developers can look forward to?

Robinson: Right now, Fusion provides access to social network data and messaging functionality. This will allow developers to know who is playing their games and who their players’ friends are. It will also allow them to post achievements to social network walls and invite friends from social networks. This works across social networks. Fusion also contains functionality that allows developers to upload high scores and view leaderboards (either social or global). Very soon we will be launching support for user-created tournaments, user-created awards (using virtual goods), virtual goods and virtual currency, advertising insertion in games, chat and multiplayer gameplay. We will also be expanding the reach of Fusion to MySpace and other social networks, GameHouse.com and Syndication partners' sites, and mobile devices.

Gamersinfo.net: What kind of support do you provide developers (either currently or once it opens up)?

Robinson: We’re in closed beta right now and working with developers to integrate their games with Fusion. Once we open it up, we will be providing a developer portal that gives developers access to our SDKs, documentation, game provisioning services, analytics dashboard and a sandbox for integration testing against the service.

Gamersinfo.net: Any estimate on when developers can look forward to seeing things open up?

Robinson: Yes, some time in Q3.

For more information about GameHouse Fusion, visit http://www.gamehousefusion.com/.