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Ever since Apple's official social gaming network was announced last week, the question's been in the air about what will happen to all of those unofficial gaming networks, of which OpenFeint is the largest. Wilkerson took the news in stride, however. As CEO Jason Citron told us last week , OpenFeint isn't going anywhere, and as you can see from their chart above, OpenFeint still believes that they can build more social game services, in the form of OpenFeint X, on top of Apple's official offerings.
And when it includes games that already rose from nothing to become hits, like Trism and Pocket God, the idea is even more enticing. And this is a smart play by OpenFeint founders Jason Citron and Danielle Cassley who named the platform after their early hit game for the iPhone Aurora Feint because it gives developers a reason to use their platform rather than simply go with Facebook Connect which you can also use with OpenFeint.
Facebook unveiled Facebook Connect for the iPhone at SXSW a few weeks ago, as an easy way for developers to leverage the huge social network to add a social layer to apps.
There are now 21 iPhone games using the OpenFeint platform. Version 1. BI: And you got some investments from Intel Capital and some other folks right? JC: Yes we did. BI: Were you always focusing on the programming and product features, or did there come a time when you had to focus more on some of these business aspects like hiring and legal and funding? How did that work for you? JC: I focused a lot on programming in the early days.
I started working out of an incubator called YouWeb. They did Crowdstar which is a big social game company, and iSwifter which is a streaming Flash game service for iPad, and most recently SpacePort which is a cross platform HTML 5 game engine which runs with native performance.
Anyway, so I started at YouWeb. The model there is that they bring in an entrepreneur, usually a developer, and give them a year to try and start a company. During that time, the incubator provides a lot of the support for things like legal, and business advice.
So the first year of the company, YouWeb guys, mainly Peter Relan, the found of YouWeb, really acted as a hands-on mentor and advisor for me helping with hiring, marketing, business issues, sales and all that stuff. So for almost two years now, I really haven't been programming. BI: Do you think the acquisition is going to allow you to get back to programming? Was that a goal? JC: No, I don't think it's a goal. Maybe on the weekend sometimes I'll write some code and my programmers will not let me check it in.
BI: One big question for mobile developers is how to promote their apps. What's your take on the best way for app promotion? What do you think of Apple's recent move to block some of the incentivized app promotions like they did with Tapjoy? We have something called Game Channel which we use to promote apps every day. We've driven up to two million downloads over the course of a couple days. The basic idea is that a developer will come to us and say they want to promote their game, and we'll do some kind of discount on the game, so he'll either make it free for the day, or drop the price after enough people to vote on it like with a Groupon mechanic , or we have an app where users can come check it out and we promote it through our network.
And if enough people download it it'll go up the charts and everybody's happy. We do that, and there are a couple other services that do a similar style promotion. If you use OpenFeint, there's organic cross-promotion you can get just for people playing your game and seeing your game in a chat room.
I think the trouble with the Apple ecosystem right now is that there's no really slam-dunk way to promote any app.
If you come to Game Channel with an app that's not so great, it's not going to get a ton of downloads, so you still have to build quality content. I think the incentivized API model was the only way that you could be guaranteed to get tons of downloads for your app even if it wasn't so good. I think that Apple didn't like that. They're very much about having a high quality app store where people can come and find great content.
The notion that you could buy app slot number 2 even if your game didn't deserve it is fundamentally questionable. I can understand why Apple changed the rankings and did what they did. Making the changes is probably good, but obviously not so good for the companies that were involved in it but they'll evolve. BI: I've been hearing Android developers complaining a lot about discoverability in the Android Market. Do you think that's a problem, and if you think so, what would you suggest Google do to make the Android Market better for developers?
JC: What we're seeing as far as discoverability goes is that it's very much like iPhone. Tons of downloads on the free side. Paid games get much less activity. The problem though is that there isn't a great way to monetize the free game. I think that to make the Market better, Google needs to focus more on its billing infrastructure.
I think that Google Checkout, while a great idea and a good effort, falls short in a number of areas because people don't necessarily like whipping out their credit cards so there's a lot of friction in purchasing. And then in-app purchases as well has a done of friction and in many places doesn't even work. Google needs to fix its billing infrastructure. That's the most important thing. BI: Right now you support iPhone and Android right? How do you decide which other platforms to support?
JC: Not exactly: we have an initiative called "OS Connect" which lets developers use OpenFeint from any platform as long as it has an internet connection. If you wanted to make a leaderboard for your toaster, you could do it if it has an internet connection.
The way that we approach the market is that we build native SDKs for platforms that our developers really want to use, so we'll build a lot of deep functionality for iPhone, iPad, and Android tablets. And then for all the other platforms that a couple developers want but aren't as popular, we have Connect. So as new platforms gain traction, and I think there will be at least one or two more, we will move to that platform and build deep native experiences for them as well.
BI: Who are those one or two more? Who do you handicap as a competitor? JC: I think it could be Windows Phone 7. I think they have a shot. It could be WebOS, particularly on the tablet market. I think that HP has such tremendous distribution power around the PC market that they can just leverage that channel for tablets.
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