OpenFeint Adds Private Networks to Its Social Gaming Platform
This week at the Casual Connect conference in Seattle, Washington, Aurora Feint, creators of the OpenFeint social platform for iPhone game developers, announced the release of OpenFeint: Studio. Through the new service, game developers and publishers will be able to create and deploy their own private clubs and social communities for mobile games.
Users will have all the features they are already familiar with such as leaderboards, achievements, lobbies, and profiles, all of which are still hosted by Aurora Feint. However, now they will be able to customize their identity into more unique fashions through a skinnable user interface. Furthermore, users can easily switch between private networks and the very public OpenFeint Network quickly.
The service is free, and the company says it plans on monetizing the service through “cross promotion affiliate fees, as companies use private networks to cross promote free and paid versions of the same games.” Game developer and publisher TransGaming has announced its implementation of Studio for its popular puzzle title, PuzzleQuest.
Currently, the OpenFeint community now has over 1 million active users.
I’ve seen OpenFeint promote the “1 million active users” thing, but I’m not sure how accurate that number actually is.
OpenFeint is in a some of the top-selling apps; but I think a lot of the OpenFeint users they are counting in that 1 million are people who clicked on the OpenFeint button, had an account auto-created for them, went “what the heck is this?” And closed it, never to click again.
I know that was my reaction the first few times I started up OpenFeint. I didn’t actually create an account and start evaluating the features until I was looking to integrate a social framework into my app.
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