OpenFeint

» see openfeint.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

OpenFeint was not something you signed up for. It was something that appeared. You bought a ninety-nine cent game, tapped play, and a panel slid up asking you to create an account with a service you had never heard of, so that your score could be compared against strangers you would never meet.

It launched on 17 february 2009, seven months after the iPhone App Store opened. It came out of Aurora Feint, a small studio named after its own puzzle game, run by Jason Citron and funded through Peter Relan's YouWeb incubator. The studio had built leaderboards for its own title, noticed that every other developer needed the identical thing, and decided to sell the plumbing instead of the game.

That was a correct read of the moment. In 2009 the App Store had no achievements and no cross-game identity of any kind, and a solo developer had no realistic way to build either. OpenFeint handed it over as a drop-in library. By january 2010 it was inside more than nine hundred iOS applications with ten million registered accounts behind it.

If you owned a phone in 2011 and played anything at all, you met it, because Fruit Ninja and Jetpack Joyride both carried it.

~ the case file ~

~ how it landed ~

The pitch to developers was clean. You got achievements and a friends list for nothing, and OpenFeint got a cross-promotion network that could push a player from one game in its catalog into another. For a one-person studio in 2010 that was a distribution channel with no invoice attached.

The pitch to players was worse, because there was no pitch. The login box sat between you and the game you had already bought. Plenty of people made an account purely to get past it and never thought about the service again, which is a large part of how it reached the numbers it reported.

~ the slide ~

Apple shipped Game Center in september 2010 with iOS 4.1. It did the same job, it was already on the device, and it needed no separate account. That was the end of the independent version of this business, even though OpenFeint kept growing for a while on Android, where Google had nothing comparable until Google Play Games in 2013.

In 2011 a class action was filed alleging that OpenFeint had accessed and passed personal information to developers and ad networks without permission. Most of the mobile analytics industry was exposed to that same complaint at the time. It did not help a company that was already being asked what exactly it was collecting in exchange for a free library.

~ the day it died ~

GREE, the japanese mobile gaming company, bought OpenFeint in april 2011 for 104 million dollars. It wanted a western foothold and an audience to route into its own platform. That went the way these purchases usually go.

On 16 november 2012 GREE told developers that OpenFeint would be discontinued on 14 december. Twenty-eight days. Hundreds of shipped games had the library compiled into them, and every one of those developers had under a month to rip it out and get an update approved, over a stretch that ran into Apple's christmas shutdown of iTunes Connect. Games whose makers had moved on simply started throwing errors and stayed that way.

~ what it became ~

Citron left, put money from the sale into a new studio called Hammer and Chisel, and shipped a tablet game named Fates Forever that went nowhere. What did work was the voice chat he had built underneath it. In 2015 that became Discord.

The shape repeats exactly. Build a game, notice that the dull social layer under it is the valuable part, sell the layer. He did it twice. The second time he kept it.

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