Apple Announces Game Center - Their Own Social Gaming Network

Apple OS 4.0 has a lot of amazing features, but one in particular shocked igaming like nothing else before. There was a discernible scream of terror from Ngmoco, OpenFeint, and Chillingo as Apple announced Game Center which is their own social gaming network. You can smell something foul in the air as Plus+, OpenFeint, and Crystal collectively soiled themselves. Now you don't need to have varying accounts on Plus+, OpenFeint, Crystal, AGON, etc. Apple is bringing their own gaming social network system that provides leaderboards, achievements, matchmaking, and the ability to invite friends. Now those achievement points can mean something with a uniform standard. The entire interface looks great as only Apple could come up with. It's part of the dev preview of OS 4 so look for many developers to make the switch. Apple has their own XBOX Live system, but hopefully it doesn't fall into the same lack of uniformity as xbox's system. Their needs to be a standard, and organization or it will be just as meaningless as xbox live. This is a major announcement not only for iPhone gaming, but mobile gaming in general, and it will be interesting to see how widely it's adopted, and how well it's managed.

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