As it already known, Apple announced new social gaming platform – Apple Game Center. It will allow gamers to invite friends, compare themselves to other players, earn achievements and will do automatic matchmaking. Game Center will also help people to discover new apps what is also great both for developers and gamers.
Games category is the largest category in the AppStore and games are dominating overall bestsellers list. There are already over 50 000 games in the AppStore(it’s much more than, for example, on Sony PSP or Nintendo DS). In addition, Apple has really huge army of gamers on iPhones, iPods and now iPads. It seems that Apple has a really good chance to dominate this market and provide its customers with even better experience.
There are already lots of social gaming platforms for iPhone gamers, such as OpenFeint, Plus+ and others. OpenFeint, for example, provides achievements, challenges and leaderboards support and also community tools like chat and forums. In addition there are some tools helping developers to market their apps. OpenFeint is integrated in about 1800 iPhone games.
Some time ago we, at bees4honey, decided to integrate OpenFeint in our games. We started with Jewelcart PRO which now have OpenFeint features support. We are happy to provide our customers with awesome social features. And what is also important for us as iPhone developers – OpenFeint will help devs to integrate with Apple Game Center! So developers can manage their apps from one dashboard.
It’s an awesome step by OpenFeint, perhaps they can keep current developers and users base. But we’ll see later this summer what will happen with Plus+, OpenFeint and other social gaming platforms for iPhone.
There is no much info for developers about Apple Game Center, so it’s better to continue providing our users with awesome experience and wait for more info about Apple Game Center.
Its really a very attractive platform for the iphone game lovers. I am going to be the part of it. Later on i ‘ll invite my friends to it.
it looks great but i need some help , iam amateur in game development , can some one help me to figure out how to integrate with open feint, thanks in advance , cheers
I loved achievements on the xbox, and now I love them on my iPhone.
The one thing I would really love to see is one of the features that xbox live has. On xbox live you can go into Facebook and choose to find your Facebook friends that have xbox live, and then add them. It would be awesome if game center had a feature similar to this. It would make finding my friends so much easier.