BURLINGAME CA — (Marketwired) — 09/26/13 — OpenKit, the open source back-end platform for “truly social” cross platform games, announced today that V1.0 of the back-end service is now live across iOS and Android, with Unity plug-in support, and is now available to all developers at .
OpenKit was conceived last December to replace OpenFeint which was shut down leaving thousands of game developers without social features such as leaderboards and achievements. In just a few months, more than 10 developers have defined OpenKit-s beta.
“We-re breaking down the silos of vertical services that come with mobile platforms. OpenKit is the only platform that supports Game Center ids, Google+ ids and Facebook ids, so players can play games with -real friends- and challenge each other regardless of the type of device and game. Even Amazon recognized the importance our vision last week, when they announced that their Android-only GameCircle service was being extended to iOS. However GameCircle is neither open source nor is it taking the approach toward universal authentication like OpenKit. And developers can seamlessly slide in OpenKit which wraps both Game Center APIs and Google Play Services,” said Lou Zell, Todd Hamilton and Suneet Shah, co-founders of OpenKit.
“OpenKit is a great and easy-to-implement service.that enables cross platform -real friends- social leaderboards. Plus, it-s open source and the guys behind it are nice, responsive, and work closely with you every step of the way,” said Whitaker Trebella the developer of , that was recently selected as Game of the Week by Apple and received over two million downloads and submitted over one million scores to OpenKit.
“The OpenKit model fits our needs very well: a clean API on top of simple services that just work the way you expect, with a dedicated team to maintain all the infrastructure for us. Compared to other solutions, OpenKit has been very easy to get up and running and doesn-t get in the way by trying to be too smart with our data,” said Duncan Tebbs of
Social Leaderboards: In addition to Game Center and Google+ Leaderboards, you can set up and compare scores with your real friends using Facebook based credentials.
Social Challenges: When a friend beats your score, you get a push notification, immediately pulling you back into the game; great for re-engagement so your game stays at the top of the charts.
Async Social Multi-Player: Using cloud storage and ghosting, you can now challenge each other across any platform with real replays of friends- games.
Social Achievements: You can measure your progress in games versus your friends.
Seamless Wrappers for Game Center APIs and Google Play Services: As a developer you can integrate OpenKit within 30 minutes to get all this functionality.
“OpenKit 1.0 is all about engagement and re-engagement in games, especially important now, since both Apple-s and Google-s store ranking algorithms take engagement into account,” said Peter Relan, Chairman of Agawi and co-founder of OpenFeint.
OpenKit is an open source, freemium platform. If the developer-s game becomes a hit, and the Monthly Active User count reaches a high number, the developer can pay OpenKit a monthly fee. Developers may also host the back-end service themselves for no charge since OpenKit is open source.
“We-re having a blast with our game, mainly because of all the social stuff that we could only do because of OpenKit. It-s easy to use, really stable and fast,” said Christian Stocker, Bongfish Games.
“OpenKit takes all the pain out of implementing cross platform social features like Leaderboards and Challenges. It-s saved us a huge amount of development time,” said Dave Mitchell, Founder of Two Tails.
Two Tails
Maysalward Games
PaxPlay
Twimler
Kymo Games
About OpenKit
OpenKit is the open source back-end platform for “truly social” cross platform games. OpenKit is led by the team that built the Joypad developer SDK, adopted by over 100 developers, for making tablets games remotely controllable by smartphones. OpenKit is an open source platform for Android and iOS for developers who want the freedom to host their own back-end service. The source code is made available under Apache (for client code) and AGPL (for server code) licenses. Developers can learn more at .
Image Available:
Image Available:
Peter Brooks
OpenKit
415-425-4225
Todd Hamilton
OpenKit
You must be logged in to post a comment Login