Internet games company SPIL Games has announced its move into the mobile market with HTML5-based versions of a number of its titles, also launching a US$50,000 developer competition for new products using the technology.

According to the company, “unlocking the full potential of mobile gaming for both developers and end users has been hampered by different protocols, operating systems, and platform-approval processes within the mobile world”, which has made the creation of native games both costly and time-consuming. By using HTML5, products can be created which can be used on any handset with a compatible browser, including Apple’s iPhone and many devices powered by Google’s Android.

Gaming has not been seen as one of the biggest opportunities for HTML5, due to the fact that native applications are able to be more responsive; a greater range of APIs are available to provide access to specific handset capabilities; and the amount of data which would need to be streamed to support advanced games would be prohibitive. The games offered by SPIL Games are simple casual games, however, and as such have different needs to advanced native games, and also lack the offline capabilities necessary to compete with fully-fledged mobile apps.

The company is running its developer contest for six months, with new winners selected each month. In addition to the prize fund, products will also be promoted on SPIL’s various websites. The top individual prize is US$5,000.