I like OpenFeint. - Very easy to integrate - Support for awards - Facebook / Twitter - Exposes your game to people on your friends list (discovery engine)
OpenFeint I prefer OpenFeint, especially with the new interface. Scoreboards are well set up, as are achievements. And you can auto publish to twitter and Facebook if you are into that. And the latest version (2.2 I believe) will cache your scores/achievements and post them the next time you are online if you're an iPod Touch user like me. I've never used the chat.
It is also worth noting that if you have chat you are required to rate your game as having "Mild Mature/Suggestive Themes". But you can disable chat in OpenFeint: http://help.openfeint.com/faqs/guides-2/disabling-chat
They are horribly slow and more important, they are not customized for your game. They always require an excessive amount of clicks/taps to do what you want. Plus, you get dependent. I would go with a home-made solution. It's easy to do and doesn't have to cost you a dime.
These online services are free and don't cost anything either. Doing it yourself costs time, which for some people could take a while to implement something like this. These premade ones to go into games take less than an hour, and have huge userbases already, which lead to extra sales just because it incorperates one of these services. I see way more benefits by having one of these. I have to disagree with you anders.
im still with Plus+. its so much quicker and has a smoother interface. open feint is ok, but not brill. btw, why not create a poll?
Yeah that's just my personal opinion. I could be just me, but I tend to avoid games that have some of the current social networks (no name dropping here) since they are so terribly slow and usually don't fit into the game at all. You have a point that you get all of it for virtually no work at all, plus the possibility of getting extra exposure. I hope the social networks develop in a way where everything is customizable and optional, i.e. possible to use the high score functionality without bringing up the standard UI so you can add it to your game. I'm still hoping for a standardized solution by Apple, but I'm not holding my breath.
Actually, I find OpenFient hard to integrate. You have to change all files to .mm for Obj-C++, and some of the files are confusing. Any good tutorials out there on making your own leaderboards?
Keep in mind, if you choose to set up your own leaderboards, you'll also need to set up and manage a web server for hosting the information – if your app ends up with a lot of players, this may end up requiring quite a lot of attention / money.
