The main reason for bringing up this comparison is so that hopefully as a developer base, we can "unofficially endorse" one of these, and stick with it. I think it would only benefit everyone as a whole if we kind of collaborated in using the same API. PLUS+ - big question here is: will this be readily available to all devs? looked around and didnt find any information on this, and id be likely to say "no, it wont be." looks like youll have to "be in league" with ngmoco to get your hands on this. SCORELOOP - this is readily available, and the support seems to be solid. The main feature of this one seems to be the challenge feature. looks like you challenge people through email though, unlike the push challenges that are seen in PLUS+. still, a nice extra feature. leader board sorting looks nice as well. con seems to be no achievement or award data available. OPEN FEINT - this one looks like it has more of the bigger game names supported. lacks the challenge feature though... does look like it has chat rooms and achievements though, which is nice. what do you think?
OpenFeint Challenges Hey Jamie, I'm one of the creators of Aurora Feint (the guys behind OpenFeint). I thought I'd just chime in with regards to your comments about OpenFeint and challenges. We are supporting social challenges complete with Push Notifications as part OpenFeint 2.1. We've begun our beta cycle and will be launching shortly with StickWars and PocketGod! Eric just wrote a short post about it on his blog. Hope that helps clarify! And anyone can feel free to e-mail me personally if they have a question about OpenFeint or catch me on twitter. Happy Wednesday, - Jason
Geocade Hi Jamie, I'd like to point you to Geocade - we have location aware as well as custom user created leaderboard integration for devs. Check out Paper Toss (#1 right now), Enigmo (#3 all-time) and lots more (we have 40+ live in the app store). We also work on Android and have a couple of games there as well.
What apps already support these services? I'm especially interested in Open Feint. I'll have to look around
For me as a customer, Plus+ is the definite winner right now. It has a great design and superb functionalities. The German version has some problems with the translation, but it's okay. Open Feint 2.1 is looking really good on the first screenshots, but as it is now, I don't really like it. It offers those chats and some achievements but that's all. Hopefully this will really change with the new version. I've never played a game with this other network, so I can't really say anything about it.. As i said before, Plus+ is the best one rught now, but open Feint could strike back with the newer version.
hmmmm i know scoreloop is free... not sure about geocade. im pretty sure open feint charges you based on its users. and i have no idea where to get plus+. anyone else have input on this?
I played around with OpenFeint today but the source is tagged as LGPL, which reverts to plain GPL on a platform that doesn't allow shared libraries (or user-modified binaries of any sort). This is a huge problem for anyone who doesn't want to give away their source code to anyone who asks, and I can't fathom how they thought LGPL would be a good idea (unless no one read it!) If they change the source license it'll be worth checking out - it's certainly a capable API but the UI could use some work. The pricing structure seems OK at first glance but it's difficult to judge what your actual costs will be month to month - I tend to prefer flat rates personally.
Plus+ is looking really sweet right now. I am not a dev or anything, but I have played on most of these and the new Plus+ network one is the best, next would be Open Feint. Just my .02 *leaves your discussion*
@LostToken OpenFeint is currently live in over 100 games on the app store including Pocket God, Stick Wars, Knights On Rush, and MyBrute (to name a few). We have over 600 registered developers and are growing. @Frank OpenFeint costs pennies per user to the developer and it can be used for free in free apps. And, it is always 100% free to players. There is no "recurring monthly" charge or any hidden cost involved. Our pricing is available on our developer site. It's worth adding that OpenFeint is heavily focused (from a developer's perspective) on cross promotion through player engagement. That cross promotion even occurs across titles -- from pocket god to your own game, for example. So you will actually sell more games by incorporating Openfeint And none of the "cross promotion" is in your face advertising -- it's interesting data about how your friends are playing OpenFeint enabled games. That is all. Carry on
Geocade is Free with rev share @Jamie Geocade is free and we actually provide a revenue share from advertisement revenue generated on the platform. We have high volume games making some nice money using our platform. There is now a bunch of competition which in the end will lead to better systems. It comes down to preference, business model, ease of integration, tools, and ease of update process. We feel really good about Geocade and think we have best combination, but hey, really, I think all the platforms look pretty good it and have their pluses (some even feel the need to put them in their name!) Best, jim
Scoreloop I'm one of the lead Scoreloop developers. So while I'm obviously biased, I would like to comment on the technical side of Scoreloop which might not be so obvious at first glance. Features: - Global high score lists / Leaderboards This is a no brainer, everybody has to have them. Nevertheless there are differences. I think with the current Scoreloop implementation we have a real winner here. Users are able to create their own high score lists very much the same way as one creates smart playlists in iTunes. This concept is very flexible and powerful. Users are able to see the high scores the way they want. We put a lot of work into making this possible and building on that foundation we'll able to take this to an even higher level with upcoming releases. - Challenges We strongly believe that challenges are the core of social gaming. While there have been some pre announcements by others about supporting challenges in the future, Scoreloop has been built around challenges from the ground up and they are available right now. Users can challenge others no matter if they have the game already installed or not. All you need is an email address (directly from your address book) or a Facebook account (more social networks will be added). This is a huge advantage to leverage viral spread of your game. In order to support challenges we implemented a quite sophisticated skill calculation algorithm into Scoreloop. This makes it really easy to find opponents who match your skills. - Notifications Obviously all people jump on the 3.0 band wagon right now, announcing 3.0 features like push notifications. It's going to be interesting how this will work out. Apple put a lot of effort into making the push notification system secure and scalable. This implies that in order to receive push notifications the game has to be compiled for 3.0 (what about all the iPod touches still running 2.x???), the game developer has to give their OpenSSL certificate to the company running the server which is pushing notifications or find some other ways around that. It's going to be interesting. Nevertheless we have come up with a solution, which we think is much more suitable, a no brainer for game developers and best possible backwards compatibility. I am not going to pre announce anything, but keep your eyes open the next weeks. - Activities Another powerful way to get your game into more hands is to show the user what their buddies are doing. If one of your buddies discovered a new game, you'll notice just by looking at the activities instantly. We think that's a much more powerful and unobtrusive way for implementing game discovery. Your buddies opinion is worth a lot more than any anonymous user rating or other means to promote a game. The best thing is that your users don't have to proactively do anything like typing chats. This is a hassle anyway and just keeps them from playing your games. The activities are derived from what the gamers are doing. - User interface It should be easy to use and avoid clutter and deep nesting amongst a lot of other things. On the other hand it should fit to your game. Scoreloop's user interface is skinable, something we've been built in from the ground up and will extend in the future. We provide a clean interface, giving game developer the ability to skin the UI to their likings. Skinning is easy to do. You can set colors and insert background images to make it match your GUI. - Game discovery As I mentioned before, it's all about reaching more users. Still there is more to come. No pre announcements here, but look for an announcement in the coming weeks. Non features (or stuff we are not going to do): - Fees We license Scoreloop 100% for free! No strings attached. So we won't charge you - not even pennies. - Ads Ads just don't add value to a user. They are annoying an take up precious screen estate. We won't do that. There are better ways to monetize your game. - Chats While there are specific games which might make good use of chats, we think the majority of games, don't need a chat. It'd be easy to implement, but we don't want empty chat rooms with people just typing 'hello', don't get an answer and disappear. Even worse typing in some unpc +17 rated comments in a +4 game is pretty bad too. (Apple specifically said at WWDC that any app getting user created text from the internet should have a rating of +17. That's what they are going to enforce in the future.) It's your game, so get all the information before you move forward. You can download the Scoreloop SDK for free at http://scoreloop.com. Also we'd love to get your feedback. Dominik PS. Did I mention it's free?
Just to clarify something with Scoreloop: how can you say it's free when challenges are charged for via your coins system? If a player runs out of challenge coins they have to purchase them, right? Sure, it's free for a developer to implement, but what if the challenge system isn't adopted widely by customers and your only revenue stream for maintaining servers & making any profit dries up?
Scoreloop Coins... Well, we don't charge developers to integrate Scoreloop into their games. So it's free. How can users get Scoreloop Coins? Download new games. Users get coins for downloading a new game they never played before. Invite friends. Users get coins for inviting their friends for a challenge. Beat your personal high score. You get coins for submitting a better score than your current personal high score or even once every 24h. Buy coins. Well, you have to shelf out some money for this, right. And finally (drum roll): WIN a challenge (isn't this we all play games for ;-) Coins really need to represent some real value. Otherwise challenging wouldn't be as much fun and excitement. In addition coins need to be a scarce resource (not like iMafia). Isn't it a true human behaviour to put your money where your mouth is?
Ok. Be warned that the 'Beat your personal high score' is open to abuse... you might have to rethink that one. Invite friends: Any email address or someone with a Scoreloop account? I agree that coins should represent some real value, but my question was what would happen if the uptake for purchasing coins is low. Won't you have to rethink your approach to funding servers & maintenance? You've said there won't be advertising, so *if* coins aren't your income, what is? Silly point but isn't it borderline gambling for challenging for financial gain? Purchase a coin to challenge. A player wins a coin from a challenge. Can they convert their won coins back into real money? Be aware of territorial issues for depositing and so forth. I realise these may not be answerable now, but i'd like to think you've considered all of the possibilities before developers commit to including scoreloop as the basis of their online connectivity.
Chill out dude. I'm sure the coin system is just there for incentive to win challenges, I like the idea. And I don't think it's anywhere close to gambling. I doubt you can convert your coins back into money.
Hi, I'm the GeoRain developer done with Scoreloop. I signed to almost all the game platforms that exist for the iPhone and I can say for Scoreloop that I'm very glad for choosing them. Can I be honest and don't have complaints? If so, below is my oppinion AGON Online. It was the first platform I signed and after a wait more news .. I forgot this guys pros: Can't say didn't tested cons: they don't have challenges (or I didn't see this) GeoCade pros: easy to integrate, very quick in the replies cons: they only have scoreboards, ugly interface Plus+ & ngmoco pros: some features seemed fine, actually they are the unique to offer push notifications for game cons: only one game, did they care about devs far from them? I think no. Two mails send them (one months ago) and no reply OpenFeint. Just signed yesterday to see what the offer, but I agreed that for a game/gamer it's better having challenges than chats Scoreloop pros: very good features, very quick in reply, they talk with you regarding new features. Challenges it's a must, very easy to integrate. The unique to offer actually the interface in english, german & spanish. You feel the relationship with them to be very close to you. cons: scoring system it's only by levels (In my game i rather prefer by points, they will work this), no game modes (promised future work there)
