Under the Bridge

Whoops, we’re really not on top of the iPhone gaming industry that well; we just noticed that a whole whack of the cool kids have put together a social networking platform for iPhone gaming called OpenFeint. And it has a bunch of nifty features:

• cross-promotion between participating games
• Facebook & Twitter integration
• cross-game lobbies
• leaderboards
• game chat rooms
• privacy controls

Whew! That’s quite the list. Now, I can see a few issues here, for starters how does their per registered user cost account for the 50% to 90% or so of users that seems to be the general consensus are pirates? — but since they say it’s free to join for free games, well, we’ll certainly look into trying this out with a free game sometime!

h/t: TechCrunch!

UPDATE: So ok, there’s a variety of social platform options! Let’s line them up:

• Cocos Live for simple high scores so far, but it is open source…
• GeoCade is used by a number of popular games
• OpenFeint as discussed above
• Scoreloop , recommended in the comments
• Viximo apparently has something going on as well…
• [EDIT: ngmoco launched Plus+ with the new StarDefense...]
• [EDIT: And see comment below, AGON Online looks quite interesting too!]
• [EDIT: In July Chillingo introduced another one, Crystal SDK...]
• [EDIT: And there's the ByteClub multiplayer gaming platform...]

Anyone have direct experience with any of these? And are we still missing any?

POSTSCRIPT: OTHER ROUNDUPS

09.06.17: scoreloop vs open feint vs plus+
09.07.13: iPhone Social Gaming Service Roundup
09.07.15: iPhone Social Platforms Compared
09.07.17: Social Platforms Revisited