Very useful comparisons! Thanks for all the input--I'm definitely bookmarking this for the day when I want to get into something multiuser. But regarding one being the "standard"... does it have to be like VHS? I would think multiple systems could co-exist just fine, since unlike VHS/Beta, it's simple for a person to use more than one. If one service has 50 games and another has 500, I don't much care: as long as it does what I need for MY game
question about openfeint Regarding OpenFeint; I cannot figure out where the cross promotion part of it is? I am looking at my Pocket God and Stickwars app and all i see are chat windows , achievement and leaderboards.... anyone?
I REALLY hope Plus+ wins the big name war over CRYSTAL. Mainly because in general chillingo seems to desperate for money/attention. About 80 apps in total, in general with 3 star ratings. 5 REALLY GOOD APPS, thats all. Look at ngmoco on the other hand. EVERY SINGLE ONE is a high quality app. While a universal networking is good for systems, there are too many apps to approve for it. In summation...... PLUS+ FTW!
In order to have a setup like Xbox live, Apple would need to step up their game and get involved with a framework instead of letting publishers face off against each other. While competition between companies is usually good for the consumer, in this case the problem is fragmentation of the target population.
Most of these services are not matchmaking, they are more score keeping (high score, achivements) and social gaming (ie chat, off line challenges etc..),. Though there is a great need for a generic matchmaking service for multiplayer games with backend databse support. I think the first one to provide that will proably win it. [to cavalcadegames: the cross promotion part is when a user of your game types something in the chat room, there is a tab which is a partially obscured logo of your game, which you can then click onto. That will then popup an advert for your game. I believe that is what they mean by cross promotion.] [to aboll2009: I truthfully don't think the backend social networking framework is too important to the user, it's the front end game which it is attached too which they care most about. It's just odds, an open platform will eventually get a monster hit (due to more people using it). The backend providers make their money from advertising mostly, so the more people through their site using their services means the more successful they will be.] -ddn
We use AGON. We found it's the best looking and best scalable app for our needs and it is developed every day further. The guys are very nice and responsible, if you have questions. I won't change it for any other platform. I am absolutely for AGON.
Does anyone know where we can find total/active user counts for the various services? I'm not fussed if a service has 20 games or 200 games. I think number of active users might be a tipping point... (as well as features/sdk integration etc etc)
Regarding challenges, I'm interested in how they work with level based games. Let's say I have a *racing game with 10 tracks. In Zombie Pub Crawl (not my game, just using it as an example), you create a challenge through the Scoreloop interface. Then it asks the user to select a difficulty setting. Am I right to assume this could instead be a list of available tracks, so that I could challenge someone to a race on Track 5? Taking this further, suppose this same game requires level progression to unlock higher levels. Is there a preferred way to block challenging someone to a Track 5 race if that Track hasn't been unlocked yet in the single-player campaign? I assume this comes down to *when* the "Challenge Levels" are passed to the Scoreloop Level Picker. If these challenge levels are variables we pass to the Scoreloop picker at runtime, this is easily controlled. Thoughts? *I don't mean *race* in the sense of a live race, I just mean allowing the user to select which level to challenge.
@BoiledGoose Sounds like a question for the Scoreloop devs. As far as I know it's completely customizable, so you get to choose whether or not your players can accept challenges for levels (or tracks) they've unlocked. And yeah - I'm also pretty sure you can choose as many track/difficulty combinations as you'd like for challenges. This is at least what I've seen in some of the Scoreloop games I've played.
According to this blurb on GameDev.net http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=541241 OpenFeint has about 1 million active users now and over 100 supported games. I would say they are the front runners so far. -ddn
Some more info on Geocade Geocade has 50+ games LIVE in the App Store, Android App Market and we also work on Blackberry. On users we are very comparable to numbers quoted by other services and add close to 10k new a day. We have had popular games MAKE $50+ in revenue a day using our system and are adding achievements, location aware cross promotion (find games that are being played near you) and lots of new socialization features very shortly. And - our platform has location aware leader boards so users can compete for the high score in their city/state/county and globally, as well as custom user created leader boards that you can invite friends to play in (similar to cloudcell). We also have leader boards that detect your presence at Major League Baseball Stadiums so you can compete for the high score at Yankee Stadium for example (more sports coming as season start) - this is a default behavior for all games. We have a lot of respect for the other systems and differentiate ourselves by doing innovative things that are unique to the platform. jim
I had also wondered how this works in Rolando2 using plus+. We are currently in the process of doing a throrough evaluation of all of the systems to decide which one to use so this is all very interesting discussion for us! Is there anyone watching this thread who has Rolando2 but has not progressed very far? I wonder if I can challenge you to one of the later levels?
scoreloop ftw. it has acheivements too and tons of titles signed up. had some fun challenges and build some coins myself. nice stuff.
I decided to go with Agon for the upcoming update to Slope Rider for a few reasons: It is free (at the time I implemented it Open feint was still charging). Challenges just aren't appropriate for the global scoring style I went for. I like the interface and the v1.2 video looks even slicker. It was very easy to implement, had it up and running in a couple of hours. That's not to say the others are difficult to implement, but if Agon had been hard to get going I may have switched to one of the others. But it was a breeze even for a non-hardcore programmer like me.
I've intergrated both ScoreLoop and OpenFient they are both drop in intergration with only 2-3 lines of code needed, so they are just as easy to intergrate. The only deciding factor was cost like you mentioned but with OpenFeint now free, it's a whole new ballgame. Though Geocade does intrest me, as that is the only social networking solution which actually you get paid directly from... hmm -ddn
ScoreLoop also pays you, you get a revenue share of user-purchased coins. It's supposedly a 50/50 revenue split but then they take out 5% for handling and there were a few other fees mentioned in the contract.
Plus+ only two games - ?Defense and Rolando2 Geocade & Scoreloop can be sawn in his sites OpenFeint no idea where to seek this.
Their own websites have lists of some of their games but not all I don't think. plus+ currently only has two games: Star Defence and Rolando 2. EDIT: Oops... what he said
