WildTangent
| File:Wildtangent logo.jpg | |
| Company type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Online/Video Games Developer/Publisher/Distributor |
| Founded | Washington (1998) |
| Headquarters | 18578 NE 67th Court, Bldg. 5, Redmond, WA 98052 |
| Products | See the list or visit website |
| Website | WildTangent.com |
WildTangent is a game network, privately held in the United States that powers game services for several PC manufacturers. Collectively, WildTangent’s owned and operated service reaches over 20 million monthly gamers in the United States and Europe with a catalog of more than 600 games from nearly 100 developers.
The company also manages the advertising sales for a group of gaming properties consisting of MMOGs and game portals including PopCap.com, FreeOnlineGames, Jagex’s Runescape and FunOrb properties, as well as Artix’s AdventureQuest, DragonFable and MechQuest properties.
The company owns a patent portfolio covering in-game advertising and game delivery technologies and operates CPM-based advertising campaigns for more than 50 US brands.
WildTangent monetizes online game play through a combination of digital retail purchase, subscription, advertising and micro-transactions using a proprietary micro-currency solution called WildCoins.
WildTangent's chairman, Alex St. John, helped define DirectX at Microsoft and is a regular contributor to Computer Power User magazine.
WildCoins
WildCoins are a micro-currency launched by WildTangent in the fall of 2006 to give gamers a way to pay for gameplay other than full retail purchase. WildCoins work like quarters used at a traditional arcade. Gamers can purchase WildCoins and use them to play any games on the network. Each time the gamer inserts the required number of coins, he or she can play the game for up to 24 hours, or until the user voluntarily exits the game, without having to use more WildCoins.
Advertisers can also purchase WildCoins and sponsor free game sessions. If the gamer agrees to see a short video advertisement while the game is loading, the advertiser will insert WildCoins making the game free to the player.
Games
Approximately 30 of the more than 600 games were produced by the company's own WildTangent Game Studios. The rest of the games on the WildTangent Game Network are from other game developers and publishers.
Originally, WildTangent produced advergames for various companies, including Nike, Coke, and Ford. The company no longer develops advergames. WildTangent used to be a publisher of Sandlot Games. But now, it's only the distributor due to the rebrand, new website and new corporating of Sandlot Games.
Criticism
Users have complained that the company's products have an adverse effect on their PC's performance or are intrusive to the user's experience.[1] The magazine PC World wrote in 2004 that although the program was "not very" evil, some privacy complaints were justified as the program's user manual states that it may collect name, address, phone number, e-mail, and other contact information without the user's consent and could distribute the collected information with the user's consent. Concerns were also raised about the software's self-updating feature. [2] Some popular antispyware programs detect the program during their scans, such as Spybot which classifies it as a potentially unwanted program.[3][4]
Users in the past have complained that the WildTangent software was difficult to uninstall, [5] although the company packages an uninstaller with the program. To remove WildTangent, a user can use the Add/Remove functionality in Windows or any number of third-party tools such as "RootkitRevealer", or "HijackThis".