Well, after sitting on it for a bit too long, Open Feint is officially going away, and with less than a month notice to get any updates through AND have them approved by Apple.
It’s a shame, it was the closest thing we had for a cross-platform achievement/leaderboard tracking service, and for the while it worked on Android, it was the only good alternative in that platform.
It’s a bit sad for players too, OpenFeint, for some, was a community on itself.
Starsman , why can’t you just build your own achievement/leaderboad( these aren’t too hard …) with a mySQL database and track it your self .
It’ll be a bit of work , but after you make something like that you’d be able to sell it on the asset for big bucks since everyone is going to need a solution …
I’d do it myself , but i have no idea how to use SQl at such a large scale .
Because time is money and integrating proven services (providing they meet your needs) that users already know and trust is generally the safer and most cost effective way to go?
It’s not just about doing y our own, but services like OpenFeint are not there just to do the heavy lifting for us. They also do a great job at creating a cross-game community. Like XBox Live, players tend to go nutts about getting more games and get achievement points. This is not something they do off your game alone, but out of multiple games.
Microsoft has it’s own solution, and so does Apple. It’s odd that Google has not developed one, but the beauty of OpenFeint was that it was not restricted to a single platform. Gamers could feel encouraged to seek games in other platforms and still feed their OCD at getting that point score higher and higher.
For many hardcore gamers (they exist even in iOS) things like these also turn into game discovery tools. Imagine you are a competitive kid with some time in his hands, you are very like to look at your friend’s game lists while comparing achievements and decide to try out some of the games you don’t own and your friends are getting lots of achievements on.
Google really should develop their own solution for this.
Huh. That’s news to me. I guess there really aren’t many social tools companies anymore (even though ngmoco made games along with plus+). Even though many platforms now have built-in solutions, it’s odd that the 3rd parties are drying up.
Hi,
You might want to look into Scoreoid, I’m one of the founders and developers. Always choose the best option for your game and yourself as a developer.
Scoreoid is totally different then what’s out and we have very strong community support. But no more self promotion if you need any help with Scoreoid just let me know - http://www.scoreoid.net/