Apple is releasing a social gaming network. What do the folks at OF have to say about it?
Apple surprised us all with it’s announcement today that it’s bringing a full on gaming social network (aka Xbox Live for the iPhone) to version 4 of it’s iPhone software. The first question that popped into many of our minds was, “What’s going to happen to current developers of this service?” OpenFeint, which currently has the largest user and developer base for it’s social platform, replied with this press release.
(BURLINGAME, CA) April 8, 2010- Aurora Feint, creator of the OpenFeint platform, welcomed Apple’s launch of Game Center today and endorses it as a major step forward in online mobile games for the Apple gaming ecosystem. Aurora Feint runs OpenFeint as a free online service primarily for leaderboards and achievements, which currently reaches 19 million iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch gamers. The company will drive revenue growth for the mobile gaming industry with its OpenFeint X virtual goods social gaming platform for operating free to play micro-transaction based games with no server operations. All OpenFeint player accounts will automatically become OpenFeint X Player accounts when OpenFeint X goes live for the general public, so the OpenFeint community will continue to thrive.
“OpenFeint X is currently built on top of OpenFeint and in the future it will also sit on Apple’s Game Center social graph, achievements and leaderboards so developers and gamers don’t miss a step,” said Jason Citron, CEO of Aurora Feint. “Apple is a key partner and we are delighted that they have validated the first half of the OpenFeint vision and we can now fulfill the second half: OpenFeint X and Virtual Goods based Social Games. Our developers can be 100 percent assured that we will continue to invest in OpenFeint so our 1500 live games, 2000 games in development and 19M players have a flawless experience with OpenFeint and Game Center.”
OpenFeint X, launched in February, is a virtual goods social gaming platform that enables virtual goods management for free to play games with ZERO server operations. OpenFeint X is live today in Aurora Feint 3 for the iPad.
“OpenFeint has become a de-facto standard in core online game services such as leaderboards and achievements,” said Peter Relan, Chairman of Aurora Feint. “That’s the first step, but the real money opportunity is in allowing developers to create the next Zynga or CrowdStar, which will happen with the virtual goods social games platform that we’ve created in OpenFeint X.”
OpenFeint X features include a full virtual goods store, detailed analytics, a game-specific currency wallet, and downloadable game assets so game content can be pushed live in real time. The OpenFeint X developer program will only be open to OpenFeint game developers who will work with OpenFeint to transition to Game Center in the future.
It’s good to see them taking things well, as Apple is assuming most developers will go with their platform when it launches. This was said in response to a question brought up after the keynote relating to current social platforms:
“The problem was there are a bunch of different social networks out there. So the goal was to build it into the platform, and everyone can be on the same gaming platform. We expect developers will build this into their games because they’ll have a wider audience.”
I’m curious to see how the other social platform developers are responding to the news, such as Plus+ or Crystal. Personally, I wish this was something Apple did from the get-go, rather than waiting 3 years to make a DUH move to one system. Kinda sucks for those who spent so much work developing their own platforms. However, only time will tell how this turns out. What do you think?
