Apple's announcement about its Xbox Live service Game Center - to be rolled out as part of the iPhone 4.0 OS - has created a certain amount of disquiet among developers who were otherwise happily using one of the freely available thirdparty solutions.
Now however we've got comment from one of those providers.
Ngmoco chief publishing officer Simon Jeffery, who heads up its Plus+ social gaming networking and publisher division has provided his view on Apple's innovation, and where that leaves Plus+.
"Game Center is an exciting first party innovation for the ecosystem that reinforces much of what Plus+ has already accomplished and proven out early in its life cycle," he comments.
"It will effectively clean up the social space on the iPhone, which has become confusing and cluttered to consumers due to the number of social gaming networks vying for attention.
Shifted target
What's more significant however is his take on how Game Center impacts Plus+'s business model.
"Ngmoco has anticipated this move from Apple for some time, and is happy to see a cleaner developer and consumer experience on the horizon," he says.
"As we demonstrated at GDC 2010, Plus+ took a strategic shift in direction a few months ago toward being a service, and less about being a set of social gaming features.
"Plus+ is all about empowering monetisation and discoverability mechanisms for the development community, and we have clearly demonstrated with games such as We Rule that these mechanisms work.
"Ngmoco reorganised its corporate structure earlier this year to reflect this expectation, with Jason Oberfest now running the development of Plus+ as a service. Jason has unprecedented experience and success in this field, having previously done the same at MySpace."
Interview
Contributing Editor
A Pocket Gamer co-founder, Jon is Contributing Editor at PG.biz which means he acts like a slightly confused uncle who's forgotten where he's left his glasses. As well as letters and cameras, he likes imaginary numbers and legumes.
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