Posted on September 9, 2009 - by Eric

Social Platforms Revisited *Updated

Over the last few weeks, the Social Platform segment for the iPhone exploded! New developments and some hands-on experience have changed the valuation of the providers drastically that it merits a re-examination. Without further ado here is our opinion, as well as suggestions for each of these providers.

Update (Sept 09) – re-evaluation based on the OF 2.5,  Scoreloop ver. 7195,  Agon Online 1.2.5

The most popular by virtue of it being first-to-market and having its roots in a popular iPhone game series. Openfeint will always be a main consideration amongst developers.

1. Well-respected brand, the OpenFeint brand is the most familiar and entrenched brand in this arena.
2. Pocket God, Stickwars , some Chillingo games, Trism and other popular games use it.
3. It is now FREE!
4. the iPurchase is a compelling feature in concept, but the implementation leaves a lot of room for improvement since its buried deep within the system. ** NEW – this has been improve with the Discovery tab upfront. Nicely implemented by going with a soft recommendation approach vs a store front one.
5. integration is NOT easy, when we tried it, our app got lots of errors despite following the documentation and looking at the sample app. Its now running but crashes still happens. Note: It is now purportedly easier to install than before according to developer feedback.
6. The branding requirement might be too much, they require their logo to be at the splash screen, main menu, pause menu, etc. **IMPROVED – branding are now suggested not mandated.
7. The UI is a tad bit too complex and could use some more streamlining, this might perplex casual users. **NEW – better, but still too complex and still could use a few tightening here and there.
8. The chat feature is great but is not properly utilized by players and can take away time from using your app.
9. No offline leaderboards and data syncing. ** FIXED – this is now in the newest version.
10. Updates are few and far between. **IMPROVED
11. Lack of UI customization options, modular implementation (disable chat), and other small stuff makes the whole thing bulky. **IMPROVED – chat is now optional and UI can be customized
12. **NEW – multiplayer service beta is now open for developers to apply for.
    
13. Unity integration is still being worked on.

Our Suggestions:

1. improve user-friendliness
2. make it easier to implement and make the thing consume less memory.
3. make it more brand neutral.
4. do more for cross-promotion, its very important to get more users which is good for both the company and the developers.
5. make the chatroom feature more useful, for example; offer developers a special chatroom where users can chat with them directly, have fixed chatrooms for general topics, tips, and other openfeint-enabled games. **IMPROVED

a VC-funded venture, that revolves around an avatar/coin system.

1. Scoreloop brand is well-designed and well-thought out.
2. The avatar art style is not too wacky and safe enough for all kinds of people.
3. The UI design is rudimentary and lacks flair. **NEW
4. Integration with Parachute Panic was excellently done. **NEW
5. the whole coin system adds more depth.
6. Its FREE!
7. Lots of very nice and high-tech features. See here.
8. iPhone games using the platform are now front and center on the website.
9. a free and dedicated app solely for promotion of Scoreloop games, is a very nice marketing move.
10. the product is well-marketed.
11. VC backed, well funded
12. Due to the size and scope of the system, Scoreloop has the tendency to overpower an app in terms of mindshare. NOTE: it seems Scoreloop can be implemented sparingly like in Parachute Panic.
13. The avatar and the coin system tends to tempt users of your app to spend time on them instead of playing your app.
14. Based on developer feedback, integration with Unity is not as smooth as can be but is being improved on.

Our Suggestions:

1. make the avatar, coin system have two configurations. LOW = means a single constant button, to invite players to participate in the avatar, coins system. REGULAR = current system.
2. top billing in the community website and the app will only be for apps with the REGULAR configuration.
3. To get to critical mass faster, find a way to make the platform available for MAC games or even UNITY WEB games!

The newest and youngest of the bunch. It is from a self-funded company with passionate developers behind it.

1. The most user-friendly and has the best user-flow of the bunch.
2. Lightweight and fast.
3. The most brand neutral and adaptable.
4. Its Free!
5. Very easy to implement.
6. Early days means bugs will be found and a few rough spots are present.
7. Stability is very improved. **NEW
   
8. plug n play with Unity iphone Advanced **NEW
   
9. Awards with clues **NEW
   
10. Being the youngest, fewer games are using it.
11. weak cross-promotional features.
12. No challenges (yet).
13. Lacks the sophisticated features of the other platforms.
14. Very friendly and helpful developers. **NEW

Our Suggestions:

1. Stronger cross-promotional features
2. Market the whole thing better!
3. Develop a unique, in-demand, and hard to replicate features SEE BELOW.
4. The website is still not done. This is a one time task that is important in showing developers you are here for the long haul. **NEW
5. Flesh out the geolocation feature, a 3d globe would be a more natural representation.

General Suggestions for ANY SOCIAL PLATFORM ——————

1. have the app be always front and center.
2. be modular, no size can fit all.
3. make the data from our app be easily exportable  (i.e. wordpress plugin for high scores)
4. be very customizable in appearance.
5. Do not restrict to iPhone only, the more hardware platform you support, the more we like your platform because we need a wider net to market our apps.
6. Test on Unity, and cocos2d-iphone to make integrating on these fixed platform the easiest that it can be.

KILLER FEATURES

These features would be what we, developers, really need and crave for. The 1st platform to get these ones up and running will surely shoot at the top of the heap;

• Crack protection
• extreme modularity
• cross-app awards (awards that can only be achieved by playing multiple apps)
• replicate the top 100 apps on iTunes but restrict it among the apps using the platform. have this in-game.
• Cross-platform support.

Remember, this space is just heating up so new features from any of these platform can change things. Scoreloop and Agon online just had major updates, lets see whats in store for OpenFeint v3. ngMoco’s Plus+ is restricted for published apps so it will never be a consideration to the majority of developers. Three exciting products for these exciting times, may the best one win!

Note: Past this point is our opinion and personal experience with integration.

As for us, Openfeint going free enticed us enough to integrate it into RPL. But the whole thing felt off and the app started crashing when opening chatrooms and stuff.  This might be due to Unity3d already consuming a lot of RAM and anything heavy puts it over the allowed allocation. So we dismissed and reverted to an earlier branch of the build with Agon integrated.

We will be going with Agon with RPL, and we are leaning on going with Scoreloop for Project Slow. We are excited for OpenFeint 3.