Wherever there’s talk of JOYity, great interest is certain: With its concept of location-based gaming, being one of the first applications for the on these shores just freshly released G1, JOYity promises a whole new gaming experience — one that’s healthier than the usual couch-potatoes’ championship of thumb-gymnastics on top of that. Anyone understands that right away. Also, what fan of interactive digital entertainment has not at least once, if only for a brief moment, dreamt of creating their own game? This, too, is what Zelfi plc address with their innovative overall conception of JOYity as a game, a game genre, a community and no less a simple stand-alone development platform for JOYity game designers.

This lively interest has not remained undetected by the press, online or offline. Thus, as early as October last year, AppVee — a website committed to critical reviews of iPhone and Android applications — dedicated two articles, each including a video review, in which they honor JOYity with 5 and YouCatch with 4.4 out of a max of 5 stars possible. These video reviews received large circulation via YouTube and drew a lot of people’s attention to JOYity for the first time.

AppVee test JOYitys YouCatch in Madison Square Park, New York (simply click on the play button)

Shortly after, Device Daily declared JOYity not only “The Craziest Mobile Games Ever”, but also, belatedly, member of their just previously compiled top ten list of “Android Applications You Shouldn’t Miss”. Likewise popular blog TechCrunch — which deals with online-products as well as Internet companies of all kinds and retrospectively added JOYity to its top ten of must-haves for Android smartphones. This way, award-winning American marketing expert, commentator and book author Rick Mathieson too found interest in JOYity and exhibited quite a bit of fondness for it in his blog Branding Unbound. There, he particularly points to the great potential he sees for sponsors in JOYity games like YouCatch, as sponsors can promote mobile marketing for their products by integrating them into the course of the games in multifarious manners.

Two months later then, in early 2009, JOYity was presented by renown American technology magazine Wired in their online special Inside the GPS Revolution. There, JOYity ranked third in Wired’s top ten list of “Applications that Make the Most of Location”.

Finally, on the occasion of the long awaited release of the G1 in Germany, JOYity caught the attention of German TV broadcaster Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen (ZDF), which was producing a related telecast for computer and telecommunications TV magazine Neues on German-language cable network 3sat. In fact, soon after, the Neues TV team came to visit our company headquarters, filmed a few shots in our R&D department as well as in front of the Bonifazius Towers and also made a short interview with Zelfi CEO Andreas Berg. The result was broadcast on 02/01/2009 on 3sat and can be viewed online via 3sat-Mediathek. (The part about Zelfi plc and JOYity goes from 19:14 till 20:14.)