Big Blog

Just this week, Paul Amery who’s the Director of our Skype Developer Program, announced the Skype Game Channel. You can make a game and package it as a Skype Extra and then publish it through this channel — and make some money in the process, as Skype will handle things like payments and billing for you.

The main market that we are looking at is what’s called “casual games”. We’re not talking about hardcore shooter or role-playing games here (although we know that for some gamers, Skype works well in those for team communication). Rather, we’re thinking of bringing more lightweight community-based games to Skype and your desktop. Things like chess, checkers, Monopoly, card games, board games and such. We see that there’s a real interest in these, as a fairly substantial portion of [extras](http://extras.skype.com) downloads fall in this category.

For more information, see the [games starting page on our Developer Zone](https://developer.skype.com/gamesdev), the [Game Channel demo](http://skype.easybits.com/demo/SGC.htm) and the [Game Channel page](http://skype.easybits.com/). If you’re a developer interested in this, you can [sign up for our developer newsletter](https://developer.skype.com/NewsletterSubscribe) so that we can keep you posted.

If you already have specific games proposals in mind that you’d like to develop and distribute through this channel, please contact us by sending email to “skypegames ‘at’ easybits.com” and “bizdev.apidev ‘at’ skype.net”.