The Rise of Womby: Online Social Games for Children

[University] Womby: A Rising Leader of Online Social Games for Children Womby is a relatively new player in the online, network-based social gaming industry. As the use of social media and mobile devices have both grown exponentially in recent years, the social gaming industry has also rapidly expanded. Social games on digital cloud platforms (browser-based and not requiring software download) allow players to enjoy a robust gaming experience almost anywhere, anytime. Gamers can also choose games and play styles that involve independent/solo play or that involve thousands of players, often scattered around the globe, interacting and co-creating game environments in real-time. With this highly interactive nature, many games exploit social networks of users as player commonly invite friends and family into their virtual gaming worlds thus creating a virtuous cycle of user population growth and user resilience to stay within the social game group. As a game development and hosting company, Womby designs and launches online social games, hosts the games on an extensive cloud computing infrastructure under contract with AWS (Amazon Web Services), and continuously upgrades and enhances game play designs and experiences. The capacity from using AWS is important as it secure the processing bandwidth the allow for rapid increases in simultaneous users. To simplify operations, Womby develops only English-language games and they therefore only markets and distributes their games in English-speaking countries. Womby’s legal department secures all the game titles and designs with necessary global trademarks and copyright protections. In fact, some aspects of Womby game designs are so unique they have been granted U.S. patents for specific in-game function coding.