OpenFeint co-founder offers relief to those burned by Gree

The new owners of OpenFeint, the game platform that dominated smartphones before Apple introduced Game Center, may have burned a few bridges when it made a surprise announcement late last year to pull the plug on the service. While it has its own alternative -- the Gree Platform -- it provided developers less than a month to transfer their games. Worse, any game data stored in the cloud was deleted forever. "For whatever strategic reasons, they decided to alienate a lot of their customers," OpenFeint co-founder Peter Relan tells us. Relan is getting ready to debut OpenKit, a cross-platform alternative that builds on what he learned at OpenFeint, at GDC next week. Like OpenFeint, it offers cloud storage of leaderboards and achievements, handles push notifications, and eases in-app purchasing. Unlike OpenFeint, however, OpenKit is also open source. "The two big asks [when speaking to developers] were: give us cloud services for our Unity games, and help us migrate off OpenFeint to OpenKit," says Relan. "So we did it. This is an open source project: developers are the voice of OpenKit." To attract as many former OpenFeint developers as possible, OpenKit is partnering with a new company, Kitboost, to offer "free assistance and full service migration services" for developers to make the move. "[Kitboost is] the old team that used to do OpenFeint integration for developers," says Relan. "They are effectively jumping on the bandwagon." For those interested in checking it out, OpenKit will have a booth at the GDC expo hall. The platform currently has 50 developers in a private beta. A public beta is expected in April, and the full service is expected to go live in May. More information here.