German social mobile gaming network Scoreloop was acquired by RIM in July 2011.

At the time, it was a surprising move, given that BlackBerry didn't have a core gaming audience, while Scoreloop didn't support the BlackBerry OS.

Behind the scenes, however, the companies have been integrating well. Partly this is because gaming is now a core sector for RIM. The company has always been very aware of the power of social connections too, thanks to its BBM service.

Working together

The result is synergies between the companies are starting to become apparent, first on the BlackBerry PlayBook. Of course, this will happen moreso on RIM's future BB10 smartphones.

In the meantime, Scoreloop is continuing to support all mobile platforms, ranging from BlackBerry to iOS, Android, Window Phone and bada.

Giving an overview of the service at BlackBerry DevCon was Volker Hirsch, who's RIM's head of business development for games.

Entitled, 'The Power of Social Harnessing: Game Design for Compelling Interaction with Scoreloop', "The most effectively app discovery mechanism is a friend recommendation, that's what we're built around," said Hirsch.

He shoots, he scores

Indeed, Scoreloop now has more than 115 million users, including more than 25 million monthly active users.

Interestingly, it's powering some big titles too with Konami's free-to-play iOS (and Android) game Pro Evolution Soccer 2012 using Scoreloop for its peer-to-peer challenge system and leaderboards.

"You won't know that the game uses Scoreloop though," Hirsch said.

"One of our competitive advantages, compared to something like OpenFeint, is that developers don't have to use our UI if they don't want to."