Chillingo opens freemium support to third party developers

Angry Birds firm Chillingo has added support for free-to-play, microtransaction payment models to its Crystal social game development platform and made it available to all third party studios.

The additions to the SDK platform focus on purchasable in-game items, gifts and advertising promotions.

"We now offer our developers two alternative business models to engage gamers - the traditional one-off paid model, and a freemium model," said Chillingo's co-founder and director, Joe Wee.

"We have spent the past six months extending our technology framework. It now provides our developers and ultimately our customers more choice in how they choose to engage with social games on mobile platforms."

Chillingo's greatest success so far has been on Apple's iPhone and other iOS products, where games such as Angry Birds and Cut the Rope have seen great success for the publisher and the games' developers.

Currently, the Crystal SDK supports iOS and Flash, but Android and other systems are to follow in Q4 2010.