Aurora Feint debuts OpenFeint platform for iPhone

iPhone developer Aurora Feint is officially launching its OpenFeint social gaming platform for iPhone today, with the news that more than 30 games are already using it.

The platform first came to light last month, but is being launched later today at the iPhone Gaming Summit conference in San Francisco by company founders Jason Citron and Danielle Cassley.

OpenFeint was developed based on the technology used for the company's own Aurora Feint series of iPhone games, which included numerous social features.

The platform allows developers to include hosted leaderboards, chat rooms and lobbies, and link their games with players' Twitter and Facebook accounts.

Among the developers and publishers already using OpenFeint are Chillingo, MobilityWare and Bolt Creative (of Pocket God fame).

The full list of games using OpenFeint at launch are:

Vector Tanks (Chillingo)
Pocket God (Bolt Creative)
2079 (Eric Tong)
iGo (Phil Zigoris)
Fetch (Phil Zigoris)
Caribbean Stud Poker (MobilityWare)
Boom Dice (Mach Kobayashi)
Entangled (Arend Hintze)
Jack or 100 ways to Barbecue (Chillingo)
Radio Flares (Studio Radiolaris)
Lumen (Bridger Maxwell)
VOID (Alex Wayne)
Virtual Stock Market (Rahul Saraf)
Master Kick (Chillingo)
Symbolism (Andrew Borland)
FindIT (Granet)

But there are others being submitted to the App Store using the technology too.

Chillingo is certainly chuffed with the platform. "We are proud to be a strategic OpenFeint Partner, and as a publisher of over 100 games we are encouraging all our future games and updates to take advantage of OpenFeint," says director Chris Byatte.

OpenFeint will be free for developers releasing free games, while for those developing paid games, it'll be tiered according to how many monthly active users (or MAUs for short) their games have.

Aurora Feint says this will start at free for developers with less than 1,000 MAUs, to an average of "a few cents a month" per MAU for games with higher volumes.

Aurora Feint is stressing that OpenFeint won't cause developers any problems with App Store approvals, because it's not an external API or framework on the client.

The platform is also open-source, meaning developers are being invited to contribute features for future versions of OpenFeint.

Stand by for an interview with Cassley and the company's chairman Peter Relan, which will be published later today on PocketGamer.biz.

01 September 2010 Aurora Feint to trump Game Center with PlayTime, for realtime iPhone to Android gaming

18 August 2010 OpenFeint adds SMS and email invites to iOS set-up

28 July 2010 Makeshift Games' Depict is latest OpenFeint Gold star

20 July 2010 One million free downloads boosts Mega Jump's revenues 170%

08 July 2010 OpenFeint goes cross-platform, adds Android support