Mobile gaming and social networks: Scoreloop challenges Apple’s Game Centre

Social gaming developer Scoreloop has announced a major deal with Taiwan operator Chunghwa Telecom. The network will be able to offer subscribers and developers in Taiwan a branded version of the Scoreloop mobile platform – which is a series of social tools built around gaming. We look at what each side is offering.

What’s Scoreloop?

Thanks mostly to the tightly integrated gaming features on Facebook, millions and millions of people are now hooked on the social elements of gaming. You can constantly check up on how your friends are doing; send around info on your most recent accomplishments; challenge each other to competitive matches; and just generally socialise with your friends as you game. This is pretty much the same set of services that Scoreloop offers – but Scoreloop is a cross-platform system. The social network created by them means that two players of the same game can interact socially with each other even if they’re on different devices.

What’s the Chunghwa Telecom deal?

Scoreloop is working with the gaming subsidiary of Chunghwa, called Spring House Entertainment. From the perspective of Spring House, there are two things it can offer with Scoreloop:

1) A social aspect to any game that Chunghwa subscribers play on the network – Chunghwa has its own application store, the Taiwan App Market, which is open to any subscriber. Customers will now be able to access Facebook-style social features on their games:

• Leaderboards and online profiles, where other games can view your achievements
• A friend finder and messaging features
• Virtual goods and currencies

2) A service that gives mobile developers the chance to advertise their games socially – a version of the Scoreloop SDK will be offered to third party developers, so that all games producers who create content for Chunghwa will be able to take advantage of the social features.

What we think?

Many of the features here are similar to the upcoming Apple Game Centre (AGC) – in fact, Spring House Entertainment EVP Leo Lee took a shot at Apple when announcing this deal: “Scoreloop’s solution surpasses similar initiatives such as Apple’s Game Center both in features and reach, as they let us bring this to users across multiple platforms.”
That’s a large part of what this announcement is about – the AGC is going to offer a very tight gaming service on iPhone when it launches, and mobile operators that are interested in gaming as a revenue stream need to start thinking about how they’ll compete with that.