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Freeverse Joins ngmoco’s Plus+ Social Gaming Network

Darrell Etherington — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 14:56:46 +0000

ngmoco recently introduced a social gaming platform that was billed as the iPhone’s Xbox Live equivalent. Plus+ is meant to track players’ in-game achievements, rankings, and allow them to challenge one another to compete in asynchronous multiplayer battles. It’s a well-designed system, and it works well, but since only ngmoco titles are supported, it feels a little limited.

All of that changes today, as another independent game maker has announced a partnership with ngmoco to include Plus+ features in its titles, as well. Freeverse, maker of Flick Fishing, Moto Chaser, and Grunts, among many others, is the company in question, and Plus+ support has been officially unveiled as coming to Flick Fishing, and to the upcoming space conquest and trading game Warp Gate. While no other games are officially on the Plus+ list as of yet, it’s likely more will quickly follow pending the success of the initial launch.

Thanks to Plus+ integration, Freeverse gamers will now be able to take advantage of all of the same features ngmoco fans have enjoyed, including building cross-game friends lists, unlocking in-game awards, seeing what their friends are playing, and challenging friends to try to beat their own top scores.

At the time of the original launch of Plus+, I expressed hope that other iPhone gaming companies would follow suit with social services of their own. ngmoco apparently had the much better idea to try to license its service with other development companies, which makes for a much more cohesive experience for gamers. It’s done a good job of not tying the Plus+ brand inextricably to the ngmoco label, so that it should port well to other third-party developers without too much concern about promoting a rival included as part of the deal.

It’s currently unclear whether or not you’ll be able to see if your friends have both Freeverse and ngmoco games from the Plus+ dashboard in either game, but it would only make sense to do so, since exposure should, in theory, be beneficial for all parties. While Plus+ doesn’t have an open SDK, like OpenFeint and ScoreLoop, it looks like ngmoco is definitely open to advances, and in my opinion, it’s easily the best designed of the three services.

It’ll probably depend heavily on how this partnership with Freeverse fares, but hopefully other companies will be quick to jump on the bandwagon and throw their support behind Plus+. Good candidates for future consideration are Digital Chocolate, makers of Tower Bloxx, Chocolate Shop, and countless other titles, and the big fish, Gameloft, which could potentially win the service enough cred to draw attention from someone like EA, which would make it the defacto iPhone social gaming network, beating out all other contenders.

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iPhone Social Gaming Service Roundup

Christopher Ryan — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 17:00:38 +0000

Like any gaming platform, the sustained success of the platform itself is driven by its users. Social gaming networks allow for increased user interaction and, in many ways, a more engaging gaming experience. On the Xbox, you have the Xbox Live service; the Playstation 3 features the Playstation Network; and the Wii features WiiConnect24. So what types of social gaming services does the iPhone support? Come to find out, an increasing number of them. Here’s a look at the top three.

ngmoco’s Plus+

The company who dazzled your iPhone with hits like Rolando, Rolando 2, Topple (my favorite) and others, recently introduced their service called Plus+. This service allows users to challenge your friends on the network (or via Twitter) and track awards and top scores on leaderboards.

For more information, check out Darrell’s review of the service. From what I have been able to find, the Plus+ service is not open to outside developers at this time.

OpenFeint

If you are a fan of Aurora Feint, you’ve likely heard of their social gaming service called OpenFeint. This service allows users to interact similarly to Plus+, but is based around a concept they call “social discovery.” Some unique features to OpenFeint-enabled games include chat rooms for more open social discussion, the ability to see what other OpenFeint-enabled games your friends might be playing (and buy them from within the app), and the largest user base of games supporting its service, with over 100 games based on OpenFeint.

For developers, if you’re interested in integrating OpenFeint into your next masterpiece, its SDK is free to try and is available here. The size of your user base, or if an app is paid vs. free, determines the cost per user for developers to integrate OpenFeint’s service into their applications.

Scoreloop

Another service to enter this market is Scoreloop, a company and service formed by previous Apple and NeXT employees. Scoreloop is based around the simple objectives of global high scores and player challenges. Much like the other services, it also features integration with social networks such as Facebook, and allows for custom avatars and personalized profiles for tracking records and high scores. Scoreloop’s “economy” is based around coins, which helps to provide a unified scoring system between games, allowing users to maintain their collection of coins and gain or lose more via challenging other players.

While perhaps not as fully featured as other services, like OpenFeint, Scoreloop is, however, the first to announce that it is working to release its service on other devices, such as the Android platform. With a larger target market and a cheaper cost of entry for developers, Scoreloop could easily become more popular than OpenFeint (not to mention it’s user interface is more customizable to fit your application). For developers interested in Scoreloop, check out their free SDK here. Bug Landing, by the Scoreloop developers, is also a free application that features integration with this service.

Will one rise above the rest?

As Twitter became popular, we saw a plethora of competitors enter the market, from Plurk to Jaiku to Pownce. At the moment, a similar effect is starting to happen among these social networking services. Where on the console platform, each manufacturer has produced their own service, Apple has yet to bring any sort of unified service to its users. Since we all have an Apple ID for iTunes, Apple could easily integrate a beautiful solution so you can keep one central list of your gaming friends, awards and achievements.

Will Apple continue to stand by and allow multiple social gaming network services to evolve on the iPhone platform, or will they step in to offer their own service?

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Plus+ Social Gaming Service for iPhone Launches

Darrell Etherington — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 12:00:09 +0000

Among console gaming fans, there is little doubt that Xbox Live is the current pinnacle of social online gaming. Sharing stats, matchmaking, ranked play, and messaging are all combined in a symphony of interactivity unmatched by the PS3, and certainly not by the Wii. Ngmoco wants to bring some of that social connectivity to iPhone gaming, and has thus launched Plus+.

Plus+ is initially launching only on Star Defense, an update to which is now live in the App Store with the added features. You can sign up for an account from within Star Defense, and registration is relatively painless. Plus+ is also one way to test out push notifications, if you’re looking for more apps that can handle the new iPhone OS 3.0 feature.

Services offered via Plus+ are game awards (like achievements or trophies on Xbox or PS3), leaderboards, a friends list and direct challenges. You can have two types of contacts in Plus+, followers and friends. The names might be familiar if you’re a Twitter user, and for good reason: They represent exactly the same types of relationships. Followers are people who’ve added you, but who you’ve not added, and Friends are people you’ve added yourself.

Push notifications come in when you complete a challenge map. Once you’ve lost your base, you have to option to Direct Challenge any of your Plus+ friends, which will send them a push notification making them aware of the fact. You can also issue an open challenge via Twitter.

I’m excited for what Plus+ will do for asynchronous multiplayer gaming on the iPhone platform. Hopefully Gameloft, EA and other major iPhone publishers will follow suit with gaming networks of their own. I have no friends yet, so I can’t tell if push notifications are working well. Add me and let’s tango, if you’re a Star Defense owner. My Plus+ name is in the screenshot.

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