MySpace to Add Free Games

The social networking site strikes a deal with Oberon to provide multiplayer games in profiles.

Users of the MySpace.com social networking Website will be able to add multiplayer games to their personal profile pages, and play them for free, from next year. MySpace has struck a deal with Oberon Media Inc. to make available hundreds of casual games from its portfolio, the companies said Tuesday.

MySpace provides a platform on which individuals or groups can build Web pages known as personal profiles, showcasing their tastes or talents in music or other aspects of multimedia creation. With the games channel MySpace plans, those users will also be able to highlight their favorite games, and perhaps find others to play them with.

Oberon supplies "white label" games that other sites can offer under their own brand. Its distribution partners already include Microsoft Corp., Yahoo Inc., AOL LLC, and a number of mobile phone operators, it said.

In addition to the hundreds of games it already offers, Oberon is looking for more, and will publish a software developers kit (SDK) to encourage the creation of new titles for the multiplayer gaming platform it will build with MySpace.

MySpace, a unit of a unit of News Corp. subsidiary Fox Interactive Media Inc., hinted that the partnership could lead to the creation of other community gaming features next year.

Oberon has expanded aggressively into new gaming markets in recent months, buying mobile gaming company I-Play in June and interactive television game developer PixelPlay in July.

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