Yep, we put some thought into this, too. I am not claiming that it is unbreakable (it never will be), but we made it harder than people might expect. No, just an email address is sufficient. I am not going to present our business model here. Our investors liked it and yes, it's not going to be coin sales alone. No it's not gambling. As long as you don't allow for cash back, it never will be. (I am not a lawyer, but that's what our lawyers keep telling us). Yep, we have been planning and coding this since September 2008.
The coin idea is fine, I'm all for it, i'm not for hidden charges or scenarios where the coins aren't being bought and the developer then has to foot a bill for server support. If they're guaranteed this will never happen then fine. Small developers need to know if they can rely on a service. I'm only asking questions to make sure they've been thought about, i'm really not having a go ... I like the look of scoreloop, just have issues with it's ability to sustain itself long term.
i downloaded the free "bug landing" to check out the scoreloop interface. its clean and easy to use (as a player). right now out of all of them this is the one im leaning towards. i like how you can jump right on the system without even registering an email address (i understand you need to register for challenges). just type in your name and bam, done, youre on the network and can do everything except challenge. imo the less hassle for players, the better. while plus+ does seem nice and will probably have the potential to blow up the most bc its through ngmoco, im skeptical about having to "sell your soul" to them in order to integrate it. heck, i havent even found any information on where/how to get the sdk for it anywhere.
I wouldn't worry too much about plus+, I mean other devs will have the same approach as you do and be skeptical with it. I don't think plus+ will completely dominate, cause not everyone will like it.
is plus+ even open to devs outside ngmoco? I'm afraid Apple will end up backing plus+ yet its obvious what ngmoco's intention are judging by the screenshots.
You can try to contact with them, gamemakers at ... good luck Absolutely agreed. See what happened now .. who replied here? Who's backing the guys? OpenFeint, GeoCade & Scoreloop guys.
The bothersome bit is that (as far as I understand the pricing structure on your site) you don't know what you'll be paying until you pay it. It might only be "pennies" per user but that's also exactly how much I make per sale.
Plus+ Hello everybody.... Just wanted to drop a quick note to say thanks for the interest in Plus+.... The guys @ OpenFeint, ScoreLoop & Geocade have great products, but we think that both as it stands today and over time time, Plus+ is going to provide players and developers with the functionality that can take gaming to the iPhone to the next level & we're incredibly committed to making it be everything that both you and gamers want. We do however, want to make sure that the experience for players is the very best possible and so we're carefully rolling out the platform & integrating Plus+ into ngmoco games and a set of initial partner products - once we've made sure that both the developer & user experience are everything that they need to we'll begin opening it up to more and more people to integrate into their games. If you're interested in learning more about the network, please drop us a line at [email protected] and we can send you information. Thanks, --- Neil.
Geocade update @coolman - Thanks for the feedback on the platforms. I just wanted to make couple of clarifications. 1. Leaderboards can be customized to match the look and feel of the game - but point taken on the look of the default leaderboard. 2. We have in game chat (it's optional). It's used by a couple of games. 3. We have seen that location aware leaderboards make a huge difference in replay. There are over 25k cities and towns across the world with Geocade leaderboards as well as every Major League Baseball Park (other sports to come) 4. We have daily, weekly, monthly and all time boards - again big for replay value. We handle a wide variety leaderboard types (time, money, points, career modes etc) and can handle multiple (including multiple types) in a game. 5. We have on the fly user and dev created custom leaderboards. I did see someone make separate comment on a platform becoming the default, I don't think any one can claim that title. I will say that Geocade is enabled in the #1 (paper toss) and #2 (in the approval process) most downloaded games in the app store right now as well as the #3 (Enigmo) all time most downloaded game.
No soul selling required Only requirement right now is great games! We're not making docs generally available right now - I can tell you that for devs there will be both a blade (the plus+ button activates this like in this video - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUSOZoh5saU) and an API that allows you to interrogate the network and skin things your own way. We're rolling our the 1.0 SDK out to some initial partners and also incorporating in ngmoco products - so look for some more announcements and information there soon. For more info., pls. email [email protected] and we'll send you an overview of the service and a summary of features. Thanks... --- Neil.
Thanks for starting this thread and thanks to the different providers for showing up. OpenFeint _just_ updated recently and I like their feature set. I like their openness as well. Business model seems reasonable. (If it didn't hurt a little, I'd wonder if there's something wrong with the business model. ) I also like that they've jumped on the challenge idea, quickly as well. So, I've been leaning that way, but, I must admit I didn't even know about Scoreloop and it is intriguing. Plus+ is looking slick, but not sure where that will be when it's time for my release. The game I'm working on is a stage-based puzzle game, so I'm also interested in players (friends or not) helping each other through some of the tough areas. So far, it looks like I'm on my own, their, right?
i know with the others you have to incorporate your whole game/engine INSIDE of the networking framework, something that our programmers were a bit weary of. is this the case with geocade as well?
I think all the dev's of Open Feint/Scoreloop/Plus+/Geocade should optimize their systems anyways. With more competition, that will make for somewhat better systems to beat each other out of it. After a while, I think the gamers should ultimately decide who they want to go with. After all, we do have to use them the most practically. I mean yeah its cool to have all these different options, but it really does suck having all these different dev's wanting to use different systems on us gamers. I want ONE specific engine running in all my games. I know that is far fetched with all the indie dev's out here making games here and there, but with bigger companies like Gameloft, EA and ngmoco (to name a few out of many) I see no reason why they all can't just collaborate and use the same system. It would be bennificial for us anyways. Sorry if I come off sounding like a d*ck or a know-it-all. I am none of those, I am just in a bad mood and when I am in a bad mood, I'm overly opinionated. As much as I liked Open Feint, since yesterday I put my full faith in Plus+. It just looks better... I am sorry heh. I don't really want a chat system, and though many might, all that is in those chats are people spamming and blah blah blah (as per my experience with the Aurora Feint game) and kids talking crap. All I care about mainly is the Achievement point systems and stuff. Those are what a lot of people want. Trophies, Points, Medals, whatever. They all are digitally cool (heh) and with all the money that I spend on the apps, I would like to see SOME kind of reward thats all. Just like on Xbox Live/PS3. It just makes sense to give gamers more of an incentive to keep playing and yeah a lot of games have some kind of achievements, but theres no real way to show it off, and I would like to show it off as a whole, just like on Xbox Live and PS3. I know this isn't a Xbox or Playstation, but if the iPod wants to be taken a bit more seriously, a full achievement system for most games (asking for all of them would be rediculous) would definitely be awesome for it. Just my .02
@Booch138 Appreciate the frank perception, and it seems plus+ is making a great first impression. It certainly has a lot to prove to developers, however. So far, the penetration is: one game, with several ngmoco games coming later. When it _does_ reach out to other developers, there is no word yet on the business model. How much it will cost developers may directly effect the average prices of games that use the service. I'd love to just throw my hat into the ring of the one I thought would "win", but it's far too early to do that. Personally, I'm leaning towards skipping any service like this in my first release, now. I don't want to start something that fizzles out and have to remove or replace a service out from under my customers unexpectedly.
OpenFeint has been available since March and currently has 650 developers working with it and over 100 games in the app store. It's not rolling out to our partners -- it's available now at www.openfeint.com to download with achievements, leaderboards, social game discovery, profiles, avatars, facebook/twitter integration, friend lists, and more. It costs almost nothing to use and you will sell more games by using it. We respect what the guys at the other companies are doing, but we know how long it takes to roll out a platform. Danielle and I can safely say that it takes a long long time. OpenFeint was built from Aurora Feint II, which launched with all of these social features last November. It's now June. As always, I'm accessible on twitter @jasoncitron, or via email at [email protected].
More info No, Geocade is fundamentally different than the other systems from an integration perspective (this of course has it's pros and cons). Our leaderboards are displayed in a webview - which is how: 1. We can work on Android, Blackberry, Pre (when they release the SDK) and some new places we can't talk about yet. 2. We can deliver new features without requiring our partners to resubmit (like when we added custom leaderboards and some new innovative social features coming). 3. We can allow games to customize their leaderboards to their look and feel. 4. We can give you a really cool real time feed of your scores in a 3d Globe that rotates to the place where the score was achieved to put on your website. Alright I'll jump out of sales mode - sometimes I can't help myself...
Actually I've got a couple more questions about Geocade... I DO like the non intrusive structure of it for sure. 1. Is there a way to control how your game's leaderboard functions/defaults? Ex: I would want it to default to global, all time world ladder once you submit your score. In enigmo and venger lite it defaults to your town, for that day. I'm not sure if this is how it has to be or whether you can control these minute details. 2. Is there a way to change your name after you initially post a score? Every time I try to change my profile name and "save", it just goes back to the usr4449849 thing or whatever it defaulted at. 3. I know you can customize the look of the leaderboard in terms of the background image, but what about the text, or the white background boxes behind the text? Can you add images, etc? EXACTLY how much control do you have over the look of it (my biggest turn off so far)? Is it essentially just an html webpage? 4. Also, you said that there is support for custom/multiple leader boards... but how robust is it? For example, lets say I have a puzzle game... is it possible to simultaneously submit 2 different types of scores to 2 different leader boards for the same game, say, one for hi-score, and one for highest combo? Or would this be limited to say, a single player score (play single player and submit your score to one leaderboard), and a multiplayer leaderboard (play multiplayer and submit your rank to another leaderboard)? Thanks.
