OpenFeint successor OpenKit goes live

The open-source backend social platform OpenKit has officially gone live.

OpenKit was revealed at this year’s GDC in San Francisco as the follow-up to Gree’s OpenFeint, which was shut down without much warning last November.

The service provides the same support for leaderboards and achievements of its predecessor for iOS, Android, and Unity plug-in support.

"We’re breaking down the silos of vertical services that come with mobile platforms,” reads a joint statement from OpenKit co-founders Lou Zell, Todd Hamilton and Suneet Shah.

“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.”

Other services, like Amazon’s GameCircle are taking a similar approach by extending support across both Android and iOS, but OpenKit’s team thinks it has an advantage by going open-source and providing universal authentication.

OpenKit works as a hosting platform that only charges developers once they reach a certain number of MAU’s, but since the API is open-source there’s nothing stopping a team from hosting the back-end themselves for free.

The APIs encase both iOS’s Game Center and Android’s Google Play for seamless integration of leaderboards and achievements through Game Center and Google+, and using Facebook credentials gives users the chance to compare scores with friends on their social network.

OpenKit also enables features designed to drive engagement like push notifications when friends beat each other’s scores, and asynchronous social multi-player lets users gloat over their victories by sharing replays through cloud storage and ghosting.

"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 Agawi chairman and OpenFeint co-founder Peter Relan.

For more information, documentation, or to download the source code, visit the OpenKit website.