OpenFeint Social Gaming System to Shut Down

jassimNovember 19, 2012

Before the days of Apple’s Game Center, social gaming was controlled by a few giants, one of which was OpenFeint. This easily integrated framework let app developers add multiplayer features and high scores to their games with relative ease, and made it simple for users to sign in and sign up. This combination let OpenFeint grow to over 180 million subscribers in the almost 4 years since its release.
According to a statement from OpenFeint’s recent acquirers, however, the service will be shutting down, and all online components will be disabled. Anyone with an app that uses OpenFeint has until December 14th to migrate away from using it, or their app will become impaired.
This change has been a long time coming, ever since the release of Game Center in late 2010. Although OpenFeint has remained profitable, even being bought for over $100 million last year, it is simply too hard to compete with a default, built in service that comes with all the frameworks supplied in the iPhone SDK. Aside from a few features, it was simply easier for both developers and users to switch to Game Center over OpenFeint. Unfortunately, without the competition, we could be seeing less and less attention paid to Game Center, but it could also mean that Apple will take this chance to capitalize on the situation and integrate some of the features that previous OpenFeint subscribers will miss.
It always sucks to see such a prominent service bite the dust, but hopefully someone somewhere will pop up to fill the gap that OpenFeint leaves, be it Apple, or a new player.