Scoreloop - Socializing iPhone Apps and Beyond

Scoreloop has been around for a long time and only more recently migrated into the gaming scene. With the dawn of the iPhone, an all new gaming platform arrived and with it came Scoreloop who had a plan and years of experience. I sat down and spoke with Marc Gumpinger, the CEO, about what they’re doing to socialize iPhone games and what their service has to offer.

Scoreloop started with a platform and a user interface and worked up from there. They just recently introduced their new Core Social service which offers the following functionality integrated fully with the look and feel of the iPhone app:

•  Online High Scores
•  Achievements
•  Player Challenges
•  Integration into Social Networks like Facebook
•  Cross Promotions
•  Push Notifications
•  Localization (support for multiple languages)
•  Virtual Currency

This means that you don’t need to leave the game in order to use their functionality and for the developers it maintains the brand experience. All of the features can be accessed right from within the iPhone game (or App) breathing life into games that used to be simply single player. They’re not offering head-to-head action but they are offering some seriously cool features like player challenges.

Player Challenges - Scoreloop’s servers compare scores without forcing the developer to change any game logic, how cool is that for devs?

For Gamers it’s like a ranked-match where you have to declare prior to starting the game that this will be your score for the challenge and who the opponent will be. The other person gets a push notification (that means it’s automatically sent to their iPhone) that they have been challenged to a match. When both players have played the scores are compared and the winner determined.

All challenges are tracked and  the Scoreloop service is able to see what level of player you are and introduce some other players of your skill level. So if your friends don’t have all the same apps you do, don’t worry because the service will help you find opponents.

Scoreloop is offering far more than simple leaderboards. Aside from leaderboards, achievements and the player challenges there are several other great features. All of the features are separate which means that iPhone App developers can pick and choose what they want to integrate and how much code they want to add. Don’t want to use the Scoreloop avatars? No problem, you can implement the leaderboards and friends lists without them. It saves a little space and still gives you the added functionality.

If you’re an iPhone App developer and you are under the gun to get a game done but still want the Scoreloop features they now offer Premium integration services which means that Scoreloop does the integration for you. Marc GUmpinger said that generally an integration is around 3 days but it can basically be from one day to one week.