Online social networking giant MySpace and Oberon Media, the world’s leading multi-platform casual-games company, have announced a partnership to make available hundreds of casual games from the latter's portfolio, the companies said Tuesday. Oberon specializes in making games for other websites. Under the deal, MySpace is to let users highlight their favorite games, and perhaps find others to play them with.

"Bringing entertainment in the form of fun, social, casual games will enhance our user experience," said Amit Kapur, VP of Business Development for MySpace.  "Our goal is to provide our members with an easy way to play with their friends and give them with additional ways to interact."

The announcement came after MySpace owner News Corp has been rumored to be targeting gaming for some time. MySpace is to reportedly launch the official games channel in 2008. Also, developers will be able to submit ideas for new games, and Oberon will be providing a developer toolkit when the game site launches.

"We're very excited to be partnering with MySpace to provide the best social networking casual games experience to its growing audience," commented Tal Kerret, co-founder and chairman of Oberon Media.

Oberon has previously provided its games, which now count up to around 1000 titles, to Microsoft, Comcast, AOL Games, Verizon, France Telecom, and NHN. Overall, it allegedly has 350 wireless and online distribution partners. Oberon has expanded aggressively into new gaming markets by buying mobile gaming company I-Play in June and interactive television game developer PixelPlay in July.

Just a week ago, MySpace announced at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco plans to open its platform for developers to build applications on top of the popular social networking site.