I like the looks of agon much better than the other ones but my biggest complaint with almost all games is the facebook twitter integration. People from facebook and twitter don't care how I do on games or how long I play for. I would prefer facebook and twitter to be very last resort and left out of iphone games. It's a social platform, leave it at that. If you want to make a facebook or twitter app, so be it. But I think it's lazy to just use facebook or twitter as your iphone live connection in a game.
Hey Guys, Jason here from Aurora Feint. Just wanted to say thanks to everyone on the thread who's supported us! We've been working our assess off to continue improving OpenFeint and make it the best and most popular social gaming platform. (That may sound like bullshit business talk, but I'm serious) We have a *really* big release coming up very soon that I think players and developers are going to really like. I can't say much about it yet (secret magic sauce!) -- but as part of our new roll out, we launched version 0.1 of our website last week. Go check it out at http://www.openfeint.com. None of that game promotion is paid for btw. We just pick the games and developers that are doing a good job and promote them. We've also managed to have a *ton* of good games featured by Apple many weeks in a row. This week there are over 15 games featured on the games section of the desktop iTunes store and more than 5 featured on the phone App Store that have OpenFeint. Time magazine also named geoDefense Swarm on it's Top 10 List of everything! (Congrats to David Whatley on that one ;-P) Anyway, if you're wondering if you should use OpenFeint and have *any* questions, feel free to e-mail me jason at aurorafeint dot com or my team at [email protected] directly or find me on twitter @jasoncitron Best, - Jason Citron - Founder & CEO, Aurora Feint P.S. Gavin from Retro Dreamer (Sneezies) wrote a great article summarizing his experience with Scoreloop, OpenFeint, and Agon. Definitely worth a read: http://retrodreamer.com/blog/2009/12/why-scoreloop-for-elf-command/ His OpenFeint comparison is at the bottom.
I personally dislike openfeint. Why you may ask? -loads achievements 20 at a time or something -loads high scores 20 at a time -does that stupid "oh it seems you have gotten an achievement, do you want to post on twitter/facebook? GOD DAMMIT NO IM PLAYING THE GAME RIGHT NOW and ive lost my chance at a highscore I prefer agon, its just so simple, nice, fast, sleek and polished.
While you're here, I do have one suggestion I have to make: lose the interface padding. Open Feint has a bunch of huge margins and padded elements everywhere in the UI, and all they do is suck up screen real estate and look ugly. Between that and the load times, those are the only real issues with Open Feint.
@sebasterbator I actually agree with you 100%. The "post to facebook" thing in OpenFeint didn't work out the way we expected. Can't win them all, eh? In OpenFeint 2.4 it is no longer the default behavior, so we expect it to be phased out from games. We still allow developers to prompt you to post, but they can do it whenever they want (such as after a level). @kmacleod good feedback. I can't comment specifically, but I think your concern will be addressed with OpenFeint 2.4! Take a look at our website for a hint. - Jason Citron - Founder & CEO, Aurora Feint
Look at the top 100 games and do what they are doing. That is the best you can do. I really do no care about any social stuff. But I probably am one of a few that does not care about it. I just think it is pountless. Another sttategy to follow is to figure it out each one would make less cost impact for you and make the game cheaper to produce. But if you thinka that this is extremly necessary, look what the bests are doing. Cheers, Bruno
I agree with these points, especially with the loading scores 20 at a time Please make it load and run faster ............it's very slow sometimes. At this point, I too agree that Agon is just polished, fast, and simple. (and scrolls through the scores fast) Maybe the update will address most of these issues?
Hi, Thanks a lot for all of the AGON support - it is really great to hear that some of you have noticed that AGON is a very game centric platform with a focused and responsive interface. Our whole design philosophy is based around the fact that most people still buy iPhone games because they want to play the game and not because they want to be manhandled into using a social platform. The platform should support the game; not the other way around. Regarding Facebook and Twitter integration - we fully agree that it needs to be completely optional what and when to post to external networks, which is what we have been doing all along; the user explicitly decides what and when to publish. We certainly feel that only very few people would be interested in generating a constant automatic stream of events to an external network just because they were playing an iPhone game - and even fewer of their friends/followers are going to be interested . But a taunt from time to time can be fun in our opinion. We will have a new release out very shortly (1.4.0) - if you are a developer you can try out the second release candidate already today by registering at our release candidate servers (http://releasedb.agon-online.com/developer). This release improves massively on the sign up flow (which we much admit was slightly annoying in our 1.3.x line of releases) adds full localization support, improved friend discovery and a number of other things. On a final note you should check out the latest AGON enabled game; Formula 1 2009 from Codemasters - see if you can snatch the top spot in either of the time trials or endurance races! Merry Christmas to all of you - we look forward to seeing what 2010 will bring for the mobile games market. Best regards, Morten Nielsen AGON Online Developer http://www.agon-online.com
Openfeint has chat, Plus+ does not. Openfeint has a better logo, Plus+ does not. Openfeint updates all the time, Plus+ does not. Openfeint is shared by hundreds of games, Plus+ is not. I think we have a winner.
Wow, official folk from Scoreloop, OpenFeint, and AGON all fighting for your consideration, pretty cute. Whichever you choose please don't forget the poor offline user! I have an iPod Touch and connect to the outside world via a semi spotty wi-fi connection at my home and hate it when my killer score I just made ceases to exist simply because at the game's end I had no Wi-Fi connection ad the score wasn't stored locally. For this reason alone both Open Feint and AGON get my votes for handling offline stuff the best. Do Plus+ and Scoreloop do this? While I give Scoreloop props for trying to be innovative with the Challenges and Virtual Currency, I find both of these aspects more annoying than useful. I really dislike the concept of the Virtual Currency as it so clearly exists, like some bad MMO, to get people to use their REAL LIFE credit cards to up their virtual currency (even if a percentage is going back to the developers)!
@LordGek Hi, I'm Junde from Scoreloop. Regarding Challenges, we've been all about challenges gameplay since day 1 as most games are still developed for the single player. Both players do not have to be online at the same time to play. Offline scores is also possible (Ref Parachute Panic) though not in our Standard SDK. We've recently extended coverage to Android so very soon, iPhone and Android users can challenge and interact over our system. Regarding virtual currency, we do have to make a living don't we? We're not forcing anyone to pay anything if they don't want to. You can also win coins from challenges. In most successful games with virtual currency, less than 10% of users pay. Consider this, would you rather pay $5.99 for a very good game that took heavy developer and designer resources to build? Or just $0.99 or none at all for the same game, which offers up $0.99-$4.99 in topups? In the latter, you get lower risk (and price) game trial. If you like the game and wish to climb up rankings fast, you can get a topup. Thanks for your props and feedback Junde http://twitter.com/junde
