'HTML5 is the future of social game development,' Moblyng CEO claims

In a recent guest post on Inside Social, Stewart Putney, CEO of HTML5 social game developer Moblyng, said, "HTML5 is the future of social game development," especially on smartphones. Because just about every phone and browser out there supports--or will soon hop on--the web development platform, Putney believes that HTML5 will beat out Flash as the primary way to create social games in both your browser and on your phone. Putney goes on to speculate that Zynga's recent expansion into Germany may have more to do with creating games that are truly cross platform than making them look prettier.

And he raises a good point. HTML5, or the newest way to program websites and web programs, will be available on nearly every device you use to access the internet. Not to mention that if a game is developed with HTML5 on one platform, developers can take that game almost anywhere that supports the language.

"The advantage for developers in using HTML5 is the ability to leverage their code across multiple platforms. All major smartphone platforms support a different type of native code, but the one commonality is HTML5," Putney said. "The iPhone, Android, WebOS, Backberry 6.0, Bada and Nokia's Symbian and Meego all support HTML5 apps. Even Windows Phone 7 will roll out support in the next year."

In other words, HTML5 will allow us to find our favorite social games in more places that are all connected while actually looking and feeling similar. I'm looking at you, FarmVille for iPhone. (Though, Mafia Wars: Atlantic City could be a step forward.) HTML5 becoming the primary social game creation tool will also mean no more annoying Flash updates and scary security issues. If Putney is right in saying that HTML5 will take over in the social gaming space, then social games can only improve from here for all of us.

Should FarmVille maker Zynga watch out for Richard Garriott?

The legendary creator of Ultima known to many fans as Lord British has founded a social game development company called Portalarium and is after Zynga's runaway success in the industry. Richard Garriott, who was right in the middle of the MMO movement back in the early 1990s with Ultima Online, hopes to catch up with the rest of the social gaming world through Portalarium, according to VentureBeat. In fact, Garriott has a detailed plan on how to do just that, which he teases in the video above.

It's interesting and entirely expected that Garriott would have his eyes fixated on Zynga immediately out the gate. If his previous endeavors in both game creation and space travel (yes, it's true) say anything, it's that Lord British aims astronomically high. In his talk with VentureBeat, the Ultima mastermind chronicles three major eras in video gaming: the single-player age, the massively multiplayer age and the social gaming age. According to Garriott, social games will take another three years to mature into something similar to MMO or single-player games.

Of course, this is a gamble just like his previous launch, Tabula Rasa, was. Not even Playfish, a studio backed by the ubiquitous EA, has been able to topple Zynga and its 250 million plus players. But if anyone can come into the game during the third quarter and come out on top, it's someone who has helped spurred two of gaming's major eras. Portalarium will launch its first game within a month's time, which according to Garriott will not be an act of "plagiarism"--an allusion to Zynga's oft-criticized practices.

After that, he plans to return the studio to his roots and release a Facebook game that is "Lord British's brave new world, or a spiritual successor to my previous work," VentureBeat reports. "This is a particularly exciting period for the game industry," he said. "We are about to begin a new time of invention."

Are you excited to see what Lord British can produce for social games? What do you think "Lord British's brave new world" will look like on Facebook?