Will you be switching to GameCenter?

I love how OpenFeint has evolved, the fact that it's opensource, and how easy it is to integrate. Their cross promotional features are also really well done, and I appreciate the extra visibility it gives my apps.

I don't (yet) see a compelling reason to rush and switch to GameCenter. Until an announcement is made that OpenFeint will be end-of-lifed, I think it will remain a popular and viable alternative to GameCenter for both players and developers. I don't want to see the existing OpenFeint leaderboard data lost, and am hopeful that if Apple does something brash like banning OpenFeint, that a painless transition path will emerge.

 

Absolutely agree. And in the end, the only thing that matters is what the majority of players want, right? I'll use GameCenter once everyone else is. At first, I think the newer devs will use GameCenter if they haven't already worked with OpenFeint, etc, just because GameCenter will probably appear to be crazy easy to use. Maybe then it will start to draw a crowd, but I'm not holding my breath.

 

At 360|iDev the Open Feint folks were surprisingly supportive of Game Center and wish to layer their more advanced features on top of GC. Most of the social network providers seem to be happy that the existing fragmentation would come to an end and they could offer compelling products alongside and/or on top of GC.

 

I'm not a dev, just your average iGamer. Well, actually, I've played alot more than my fair share of iDevice games on every existing social network. I think it'll be a rough transition to keep the majority of serious gamers happy while trying to merge Open Feint, Plus+, Agon, Scoreloop etc. all into GameCenter. If I were a company such as Agon Online or Scoreloop I'd be wondering what benefit lies in cooperative intergrating with the service that is rendering my profit engines useless. I haven't seen one thing indicating Apple's acknowledement that these companies have been a vital, intregal "missing link" in their system, so I really doubt Apple is going to offer any severence to them. So if I'm say, Agon, I'm certain as Hell not going to go through the trouble nor the cost of transfering millions of files to better the company that gave me the royal shafting.

It's unfortunate that Apple is acting the part of the Holy Roman, bigwig who doesn't care who they steamroll to climb higher. OF, Agon and Plus+, in particular, have built their services according to mass player input and demand and evolved rather nicely, on the whole. It sucks to see everything they've worked to create flushed by Steve Jobbs, like a turd down the toilet.

I'm not completely sure on all the details of GameCenter, and hopefully they've taken all this into account and have some smooth transition structure. For some reason I doubt that's the case.

It's not the end of the world if I lose my Agon Pocket Score or my OpenFeint achievements for literally hundreds of games. It does make me wonder why Apple seems to be taking the whole iGaming thing as "on the fly" fixes instead of having a structured plan in play.

Richard

 

I'm going to wait and see how Openfeint's plans work out and what Gamecentre actually feels like to use. By my own figures, 36% of those who downloaded Ground Effect (and presumably a much higher proportion of those who played it for more than a few minutes) registered on Openfeint, which is a pretty huge takeup. It's possible that Gamecentre will take a while to achieve similar popularity.

 

I'll support GameCenter - especially if they do a proper link to to Facebook. I have 3 OpenFeint friends. I have 200 Facebook friends. OF has been useless for me as a gamer. Generally these days I say "No, I don't want these cool features".

 

Since we haven't used any sort of system yet we'll be using the GameCenter (unless of course it's sorely disappointing) - we figure the official Apple supported method would always be the best way to go. I like the things that OpenFeint offers, but hey, you can't fight city hall

 

as long as its good, i'll be switching to it.

 

As a gamer I love OpenFeint, and dislike Crystal and many of the others. OF is really easy to use and I love the cool features like forums.

I would prefer to have only 1 network for all games like PSN for instance (XBL is bulls#¡t having to pay for p2p), which would make everything easier on this side.

 

I'll be switching to it.

I think that with an un-deletable on the home screen, many casual players not on forums would be more inclined to use it.

I think it might even evolve to the stage where every iPhone/iPod touch/iPad owner has a GameCenter account. That's a lot of players.

 

I'm interested, but I'll have to look at the platform once it's adopted and reconsidered our position. I do however believe that the API built do give advantage to certain type of game, especially those that wish to enable dueling.