Case Studies

Check in and Dominate: PhoneGap Score with IGN for Playing Well with Others

29 Jul 2011

Gaming is, by nature, social. That means sharing wins, strategies and bragging rights with friends. Of course when those friends are all playing different games at different times on different platforms, you need a convenient way to find out who’s doing what so that you can invite them to help you slay dragons, birds, or your antagonist of choice.

Enter Dominate, a mobile app by IGN—currently available for iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad—that allows gamers to share their virtual exploits with friends. “Gamers are inherently competitive and Dominate gives them an outlet to compete with their friends about how much they know about a game based on how much they play it,” said Anand Iyer, Director of Product Management for Mobile at IGN.

Dominate lets gamers share stats from PC, console and iOS games both within the iOS app, as well as on social networks like Facebook and Twitter. It also offers tips and info about the games they check-in to, and recommendations for other games they might like. Gamers who check-in to a game often enough will accrue rewards and, eventually, will literally become the game’s Dominator.

Since playing well together is a key tenet behind IGN’s app, it’s no wonder the company chose to build Dominate using the open source PhoneGap framework for its ability to create apps that can be deployed on multiple mobile platforms. PhoneGap also works in concert with the Sencha Framework. Sencha is an open source tool designed to create apps that look and feel native to iPhone, BlackBerry and Android devices, and its coupling with PhoneGap scored big points with IGN. “We made a philosophical decision to go cross-platform with all our apps moving forward,” Iyer said. “PhoneGap gives us a nice API to get device-specific functionality, and Sencha gives us a nice framework to create web apps that look and behave native. We didn't consider any alternatives.”

PhoneGap first caught IGN’s attention in 2009 when it won the People’s Choice Award in the Web 2.0 Expo’s Launch Pad startup program, which recognizes distinctive new companies and products. “I was a judge on the contest where Nitobi (PhoneGap’s parent company) ended up winning,” Iyer said. “When I was working at Microsoft on Windows Phone 7’s developer platform, I started to realize that developers are going to continue to feel the pain when it comes to targeting multiple phone platforms with their apps. Working with JavaScript (within PhoneGap) lowers the barrier for entry to a mobile platform. We definitely want to bring Dominate to Android as well and we are going to realize our benefits as we start to target other platforms by using a single code base. PhoneGap is a great concept and a much needed tool as fragmentation in the mobile space continues to grow.”