Aurora Feint Announces New OpenFeint SDK, Promises Game Center Cooperation

iPhone social middleware developer Aurora Feint will release a new version of its OpenFeint SDK next month, the company said today, with a promise that developers will be able to "mix and match" between OpenFeint features and new functionality added by Apple's own iPhone social network, Game Center. The Burlingame, California-based company says its software is in use by 8,000 official developers across 1,900 games, reaching a total registered player base of 25 million. For OpenFeint 2.5, Aurora Feint has restructured its APIs, claiming it has made its so-called "twenty minute basic integration" go even even faster, along with "revamped social APIs for leaderboards, achievements, and Game Center compatibility." New to the middleware is support for turn-based multiplayer with push notification capability. Aurora Feint says it has dozens of developers in the private beta of version 2.5, and as a result some games making use of the software have already been released to the App Store. When Game Center was revealed earlier this year, there was speculation that Aurora Feint's third-party social network would suffer in the wake of an official Apple effort. Soon after the announcement, company founder Jason Citron expressed surprise at the move, but said Aurora Feint would work to integrate with the new initiative. In a statement today, the company said "Game Center and OpenFeint co-existence [will be] seamless for developers who choose to use Game Center."