Wooga HTML5 Project Goes Open Source

Wooga stops development of HTML5 game ‘Magic Land Island’ and releases open source code

Renamed game, ‘Pocket Island’ on App Store, code available on GitHub

Wooga focuses on native mobile apps

Berlin, 21 June 2012: Wooga is excited to announce ‘Pocket Island’, an open source HTML5 game now available to download and iterate upon.

Pocket Island launched under the name ‘Magic Land Island’ in October last year. Wooga has now stopped development and is making the game open source. The title was originally conceived as an experiment for Facebook’s emerging HTML5 platform and was a launch partner before the project developed into a fully fledged title and one of the world’s most advanced HTML5 games.

Wooga is now handing over development to the community and making its work freely accessible to all. Featuring new age HTML5 APIs, Wooga’s vision for Pocket Island is to encourage and inspire the HTML5 community to bring the technology forward to the point where it’s suitable for the mass market.

Philipp Moeser, co-founder and CTO at Wooga said, “We’re very proud of the work we’ve done with HTML5 over the past year. With some of the most talented software engineers in the industry working on the project here at Wooga, we’re confident that the community will find lots to learn within Pocket Island and use our experience to progress the technology even further. HTML5 certainly has the potential to be a complete game changer, but the technology isn’t there yet”.

From its release in October until development ended on 5th May, 1.3 million people played the HTML5 game whilst in comparison Diamond Dash on iOS has been downloaded over 18 million times. Looking at 1-day retention figures for the HTML5 game, 5% of users came back to play the HTML5 game the next day compared to almost 50% returning to Diamond Dash mobile. This was the most difficult performance gap between HTML5 and natively developed apps.

Wooga now focuses on its native mobile projects as it continues to expand its presence on mobile.

Pocket Island is now available to download from the iOS App store so that curious engineers can experience the game’s most recent iteration. Developers are encouraged to post their code on the title’s GitHub page: https://github.com/wooga/pocket-island. The game is under an MIT license with the art assets under a Creative Commons Non-Commercial license.

HTML5 is an open platform technology for the web that allows a game to be played on any mobile device through the web browser. The technology holds much promise but has yet to truly penetrate the mass market thanks to performance gaps between native apps and HTML5.

To read the full story on Wooga’s journey from Magic Land Island to Pocket Island and to download the app please visit our website: http://labs.wooga.com