Heads up to those of you who have games with OpenFeint support: bad things could happen if you don't get rid of it by December 14.
OpenFeint's new owner Gree said Friday that it will shut down OpenFeint's servers for good on or about that day, as it finalizes its phasing out of OpenFeint in favor of its Gree Platform.
Any network calls OpenFeint makes in a game will of course be nonfunctional, which Gree says "may result in service disruptions to your game and a poor player experience." Additionally, all data stored on OpenFeint will be gone for good.
The company says that transferring from OpenFeint to Gree is a relatively painless process, though basic integration "can take less than a week," so you might want to get moving.
"relatively painless" = spend a week or more making code changes and push your game through app store approval pipelines and convince all your players to install an update.
What planet do these people live on? There's no way that could be a worthwhile investment of time and energy for older titles, so this is basically screwing over customers who have bought OpenFeint-based games.
That's silly. Why not just integrate the service in the backend? It might be a bit of a hassle to make it work, but it's better then losing your developers to Game Center.
Why are they throwing away nearly 5+ years of OF integrated apps, where arguably the real value of OF lies. Probably 80% of them are not even actively updated anymore so even if they could get people to switch over to GREE, it would be a fraction of the original number of OF integrated apps.. This seems like the perfect shooting yourself in your foot move.
Obviously Gree has a clear conflict of interest handling OpenFeint. They don't seem to be as interested in supporting it as they're in promoting their own games. Luckily there are plenty of alternatives out there, GameCenter, Scoreoid, etc.
If you're interested in location based leaderboards, Geosophic might be a good option too (www.geosophic.com).
Disclaimer: I work for this company so if you have any questions, feel free to contact me.
What planet do these people live on? There's no way that could be a worthwhile investment of time and energy for older titles, so this is basically screwing over customers who have bought OpenFeint-based games.
If you're interested in location based leaderboards, Geosophic might be a good option too (www.geosophic.com).
Disclaimer: I work for this company so if you have any questions, feel free to contact me.