Interview

Aurora Feint talks OpenFeint, its iPhone social gaming platform

Bringing Xbox Live type features to indie developers

Aurora Feint talks OpenFeint, its iPhone social gaming platform
Today's the day for the launch of OpenFeint, a social community platform developed by the company behind the popular Aurora Feint series of iPhone games.

The details can be found in our earlier story, but we grabbed Aurora Feint co-founder Danielle Cassley (pictured) and chairman Peter Relan to find out more on the company's plans for OpenFeint.

15 developers have already signed up to use the platform, which provides features like leaderboards, chat lobbies, and the ability to link player accounts with Twitter and Facebook. Those developers include big-hitter Chillingo, as well as Bolt Creative, the firm behind the wildly successful Pocket God series.

“We wanted to cover all kinds of developers, from indies to large ones,” says Cassley. “And we've covered as many categories in the App Store games section as possible – pretty much all of them in fact.”

Relan takes up the baton. “Today, iPhone lacks its own native social network specifically for games, so that's what we are providing with OpenFeint,” he says. “It's a full-blown social network for games on the iPhone, and we'll interface with Facebook Connect, Twitter and in the future MySpaceID so that developers don't have to force users to choose one or the other.”

There are many interesting aspects to OpenFeint. One is that developers can create chat lobbies for individual games, but also wider lobbies – for example those that cover all of a publisher's titles (for example, the Chillingo lobby). Then there are global OpenFeint chat lobbies.

“Imagine the cross-promotion that's possible there,” says Relan. “A lot of small independent developers won't have had the chance to cross-promote their games before. But when players are chatting, we'll display the name of the game they've come from – so that developer's game is being exposed to other players.”

Presumably those lobbies also become potentially lucrative advertising spaces, then?

“Ads? Stay tuned,” laughs Relan. “There's a little bit of real estate in those lobbies that some of the bigger publishers might be interested in...”

The big question PocketGamer.biz has about OpenFeint is whether it will fall foul of Apple's App Store rules. When Trism developer Steve Demeter tried to launch this kind of community platform – Onyx Online – he ended up giving up after claiming that games incorporating it might not be approved by Apple. Could OpenFeint-enabled games run the same risk?

“No,” says Relan. “The Apple SDK agreement specifically excludes the use of an external API or platform, so what we've done is open-sourced the OpenFeint client – which is exactly what FbConnect had to do, by the way. The objective C code on the client cannot be an API – it has to be source code provided to developers. So that's the key difference between OpenFeint and the way Steve did it. The open source thing is key.”

Actually, it's key in other ways, too. Aurora Feint is actively encouraging its developer partners to contribute features and help evolve OpenFeint – something that could speed the development of new features for the platform.

Aurora Feint has been working on the platform for a while, but of course this week Apple announced the iPhone 3.0 software, with more than 1,000 new APIs for developers to get their hands dirty with. How will that affect the development of OpenFeint? It seems micro-transactions could be one important element.

“In the future, you might see things like when a group of players in a public chatroom wants to set up a private chatroom dedicated to them, that could be a premium feature that they pay for using micro-transactions,” says Relan. “Right now, if you want to upsell anything within the game, you can't. So that will now be in the iPhone SDK, which could be powerful for OpenFeint.”

Cassley chimes in. “Push notifications will be huge for our kind of social environment too. Developers will be able to easily link people up – 'your friend wants to play chess with you' – so it'll be really easy to connect people up to play games and let them know when they should be engaging in OpenFeint. That little red bubble above your game's icon is going to be really powerful.”

So, money. The OpenFeint client may be open-source, but the company will charge for the back-end web services element. That's par for the course, but there are interesting aspects.

For example, developers producing free games won't have to pay to use OpenFeint, since presumably they'll be trying to upsell their players to a premium version – which will also require OpenFeint features, which they'll then pay for.

For premium titles, OpenFeint will work on the principle of monthly active users (MAUs). “For the first thousand MAUs, it's free,” explains Relan. “Then it scales up between that and 100,000, when you get to the top tier. But it's still cents per user at that level. But free games and smaller numbers of users are free, because we want to get this platform out there.”

It's a sensible strategy, particularly for a platform aimed at indie developers – effectively it'll grow with them as they get hits and bring in more revenue. And while the Gamelofts and EA Mobiles of the world are working on their own proprietary community features, there's a helluva lot of indies out there, and with big hits too – Pocket God, for example.

What of Aurora Feint, though? Will the company still be making its own games as well as evolving its platform?

“Aurora Feint will always be our flagship,” says Relan. “We're planning on releasing another couple of titles this year.”
Contributing Editor

Stuart is a freelance journalist and blogger who's been getting paid to write stuff since 1998. In that time, he's focused on topics ranging from Sega's Dreamcast console to robots. That's what you call versatility. (Or a short attention span.)