Two months ago LA game publisher and distribution platform Scopely finally pulled the curtain back to reveal what it’s been building with the $8.5 million it raised since July 2011. The vision was, not surprisingly, bigger than its “with Buddies” franchise of mobile games, despite the fact that all three titles released to date have been Top 5 games in the iOS App Store. Scopely’s big vision is its invite only Scopely Developer Network game distribution, marketing, and monetization platform for third-party developers.

Today, the company announced the first five studio partners who will work in conjunction with Scopely’s team, and rely heavily on its technology platform, to create and distribute multiplayer mobile games. Apparently the company didn’t aim low, as it attracted highly decorated firms Double Fine, Big Cave Games, High Line Games, Rocket Jump Games, and Zupcat Games.

But with all their previous success, why would these studios need to partner with Scopely? The idea is to free up their development resources to focus on building superior games, rather than having to worry about distribution and monetization, says Scopely co-founder and CEO Walter Driver.

“Scopely allows developers to focus their talents and resources on building quality games,” Driver says. “We get involved early in the development cycle, integrating social mechanics across each game, investing in marketing and cross-promotional opportunities with our existing user base and ultimately, launching games so they are poised for success.”

The importance of a successful launch cannot be understated, as it can quickly translate into high rankings and featured status with prominent App Stores, creating a self-fulfilling cycle. Those who have summited the mountain before, and have cleared a path to the top, become valuable partners. Once at the top, it’s important to continue delivering a satisfying and inherently viral experience to maintain this positioning. Scopely has proven adept at doing both, having dogfooded its own Developer Network platform with its more recent release Bubble Galaxy With Buddies. The app became to the No. 1 free game on the iOS App store within its first five hours and was downloaded more than one million times in its first week.

Double Fine, which is well known for the game G4 called the “Funniest Game Ever,” Psychonauts. The 12 year old San Francisco studio also recently grabbed headlines by raising $3.3 million on Kickstarter for the yet to be created Double Fine Adventure game. Dallas-based Big Cave Games, for its part, is behind ORC: Vengeance, which was named App Store’s Editor’s Choice and Best of 2012, Showpiece Games.

High LIne games is a Brooklyn publisher behind the W.E.L.D.E.R. words game that at one point reached the number one overall iPad app. Rocket Jump Games and ZupCat Games are both international firms, based in New Zealand and Argentina, respectively. The former created the popular rail shooter Major Mayhem, while the latter is well known for its Facebook game Race Town and for its work with Cartoon Network, Fiat, Kraft Foods, and MTV.

In addition to cross promotion within Scopely’s network of millions of active users, the publishers get access to the company’s Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS)-based multiplayer technology and server-side infrastructure.

The company faces competition in the social and mobile game distribution space from the likes of Zynga and Chillingo, although they tend to focus more on offering marketing support than on pre-launch development resources. Also, the majority of these competing options tend to be one size fits all and purely “pay to play.” Scopely, on the other hand, is exclusive in the partners it’s willing to invite and negotiates revenue sharing models on a per-partnership basis based on the pedigree of the development partner and the resources to be dedicated.

Scopely was founded in 2011 by Driver, a long time social gaming entrepreneur, alongside former Applied Semantics co-founder Eytan Elbaz, former MySpace Developer Platform lead software developer Ankur Bulsara, and startup veteran Eric Futoran. The team also recently added former Zynga GM Andy Kleinman as its first Chief Business Officer. Scopely is backed by Anthem Venture Partners, The Chernin Group, Greycroft Venture Partners, and New Enterprise Associates (NEA), as well as several dozen prominent angel investors.

The company is well positioned in today’s game publishing landscape, but is likely to face increasing competition going forward. Earlier today, two Zynga Farmville veterans announced an eerily similar project called Red Hot Labs which is backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock Partners, SV Angel, and General Catalyst. It’s unlikely to be the last. Driver downplays the similarities, describing Red Hot’s offering as “developer tools” while characterizing Scopely’s more as a “broadcasting network,” or in other words Final Cut Pro versus Fox.

As in many categories, gaming appears to be evolving such that the platforms and enabling technology providers have become more valuable than the content creators that use them. Not surprisingly, this is where today’s VC dollars seem to be flowing. Scopely’s biggest advantage is that it saw this trend early and has several years of head start over its competition. Driver’s challenge now, is to maintain that lead.

I have been paining a bedroom and working on my computer the last few days, clearing and cleaning and organizing. Somehow I had 329 e-mails in my inbox and my screen was as cluttered as my “real” desk area is ! I was thinking about how amazing phones and computers and iPads are and thought it was time for a cool tools post.

I have been trying to add a new logo to the sidebar, I don’t know why I am having such problems! But anyway, you have probably all heard of Pinterest and I have been playing with it for a bit. I can understand if you look at it and think “huh?”, but I find it incredibly appealing! It feels like a very elegant virtual scrapbook to save things I like. I spend way more time than I should on the Internet, looking for design ideas and blogs written by interesting people. I admit to pulling images off and printing them on paper for my design files. With Pinterest, I can do it virtually and share them with others. The fun begins when you find pinners who share your interests from all over the world. I have not really explored the whole variety of pinned things; I tend to look at fiber arts and colorful images. Check out my pages and see what you think! If you’d like an invitation let me know and I will send you one. Unfortunately you have to join Twitter or Facebook, but I joined Twitter and just ignore the account. (And I will get that logo up!)

I was telling a friend about games that I have on my iPad and iPhone and she pretty much said she thought it was stupid… I love my games, even though I am a pretty old lady and here’s why – they’re fun! How many times have you sat in a doctor’s office waiting for them to get to you? My former OBGYN was wonderful, but unless I was one of the first patients of the day, I often waited for an hour or two! I usually forgot a book and reading endless copies of Parents magazine wasn’t much fun. Now I turn the sound off and am totally amused as I wait. Here are some games I love! W.E.L.D.E.R. is my new fav! I really enjoy word games and this one is a lot of fun and as well as being visually appealing. It has the look of something very Steampunk. Ever since I learned to play Mahjong when we lived in Singapore, it has been a game I must have. It’s fun to change the backgrounds and tiles and arrangements. I also enjoy Sudoku and there are a lot of versions to choose from.

This app is now on my iPad and I think it will be great. It uses my finger as a pen and I can write notes and draw pictures and save or print it anywhere. It’s called Penultimate. I was just shopping at The Container Store, for instance, and there were some containers that I thought would be useful for the rug hooking supplies I am trying to organize. I took a picture of them. What I’ve found is that they get “lost” on my phone or I look at them later and don’t remember what I was thinking when I snapped a picture. Now I can paste the photo in Penultimate and scribble down the ideas I have for later. Pretty cool.

On my studio computer is the most wonderful site called Pandora. Peter introduced this to me and I love it. I spend hours and hours down here, sewing, hooking, designing, reading blogs and checking out Pinterest and I like to listen to music. I grew tired of my iTunes songs and so Peter suggested Pandora. You can create your own radio stations and it will play an endless variety of songs. Best of all, you can delete the songs or artists that you don’t like!!! There is a free version, but I listen so much that I had to subscribe. But it’s well worth it. Peter says he has loads of stations; I just have new age, current on the radio music, oldies and folk/international music. Oh and Christmas, of course. It won’t let me access the website without putting “my station” on the address, but it’s pandora.com.

Oh and just one more! This app is for the phone and is called Red Stamp. It has all sorts of templates for greeting cards, with and without places for photos. You can create a card, on the go, on your phone and send it off to a friend.

So there you have just a few of my ideas for fun and killing time….Let me know your favorites!

Ok folks Im an addict, Im more strung out the a crack whore on payday, a drunk in a liquor store, your mom… O you get the picture. Anyway I started playing this game called W.E.L.D.E.R., a grid based word game and I am hooked.

To be honest I wasn’t going to do another game review this week nor was I going to actually buy this game but, I am glad I did. This game was a recommendation from another site that I visit for reviews and general information the reviewer raved about the game giving it high marks. Based on his review and the ones I saw at iTunes I figured I had to try it.

As I mentioned before this game is a grid based word game meaning that you are presented with a group of letter on a 8×8 grid that you move and manipulate the tiles to create words and score points. The game scoring system allows you to level up which will give you the ability use special moves that are unlocked at the different levels. The basic game play assigns a numeric value to the tiles and as you progress through the levels the tiles have the ability to be changed to special value and type tiles (some cannot be switched some cannot be moved without being used in a word) and abilities.

The basic game is really that simple to play, move a few tiles make a few words,score some points and bango your playing the game for 4 hours without noticing it.

The game also features tools and mini games to help you discover new words.

I would give the game a 4 1/2 out of 5

My favorite Apps of 2011…

I had been running here and there for four years, but 2011 was the year I committed to it. Thanks to the Nike Plus App, I know that I ran 101 outdoor runs in 2011. I ran for 53:35:45 total hours burning 50,330 calories. That’s 14 lbs. of weight loss in a year.  I’ve lost 20, but have done about 75 treadmill runs as well. I needed to lose the weight and feel better. This App for me was a huge key. It made running a fun math problem. The GPS feature is great and works 90% of the time. And Tracy Morgan talks to me after my runs.

I discovered Evernote after listening to a Stanford podcast from its founder. I’ve only been using it for a month, but I can tell that it is going to stick. I love researching and learning, but I have never found a system to organize the data I come across. This App allows you to clip webpages and file them. You can later search by keyword. You can take notes in meetings directly in it and even take photos of text, like on a white board. It can read handwriting from photos and bring up those notes when you key word search.

W.E.L.D.E.R. is my Angry Birds of 2011. (Fun, addictive time-waster.) It’s a word game App well worth the $1.99. It keeps me company on long flights and helps me fall asleep at night. I like to call it Words Without Friends. If you like Words or Scrabble or crossword puzzles, you will dig it. My current high score is around 75,000. So beat that, sucka.