Inside Social Games

There are around 8,000 games currently on the iPhone platform. It’s a competitive landscape for any developer who wants his product to stand out, so developers are increasingly finding distribution through virality by adding social features. Although third-party companies such as Come2Play and J2Play have assisted developers with key aspects of social development, Scoreloop has launched a new platform for the iPhone specifically.

The Munich, Germany-based startup has recently announced a new platform for building social features into iPhone games. These features include challenging other players to asynchronous or multi-player matches, and comparing high scores. Developers won’t be limited to the iPhone; they can actually extend to social networks such as Facebook.

Like Facebook, Scoreloop has a system that supports friend invites. When it comes to challenging other players to games, it baked in an excellent matching system — meaning you will generally only play people at the same skill level as you. This system is based off of points, which players receive after they win a game. So the more points you have, the higher your “skill” is.

Players will also receive coins that allow them to play new challenges. Once they run out of coins, however, they will have to purchase more should they wish to continue playing challenge modes. When users make a purchase for the aforementioned coins, Scoreloop receives part of that revenue – this is how Scoreloop intends to make money.

The platform will publish activities within the game into communication channels on Twitter and Facebook. It will even recognize the country in which the gamer resides (and, if they desire, their city or town). This might stir up a competitive desire within the user base.

Though tailored specifically for the smaller development companies, Scoreloop does offer a possible means to compete against major developers such as Zynga, Playfish, or SGN. The platform provides social analytics, game discovery through recommendations, and even free server operations.

Considering the competition for games on the iPhone, it’s not surprising to see another platform like this appear on the scene. iPhone developers will likely give it a shot for its sharing capabilities, but we look forward to seeing how developers respond to the company’s revenue sharing model.