Apple's Game Center playing nice with others

From CNET News.com: One question that was raised almost immediately when Apple announced Game Center, the company's first-party social gaming service, in April was what would happen to existing social game networks on the platform? The early answer, surprisingly, is comfortable cohabitation.

Game Center has cropped up in a very, very small percentage of games on the App Store, though in the coming months it's likely to be found in just about every new game that comes out from major publishers. It adds a number of social features to games including achievements, leaderboards, and game challenges--all things developers can build into their titles through Apple's iOS software development kit.

The problem then was that many of these features were already available on existing social game networks, including names like OpenFeint, Plus+, ScoreLoop, and Geocade. So what are developers to do? And more importantly, what are they doing?

There are already some signs that the cohabitation of more than one game network within games (old and new) isn't just possible, it's something designers are actively working on.

One of the companies on the front line of this is OpenFeint, which can stake its claim as being the first social gaming network, and also one of the first that's been able to adapt to Apple's incoming presence.

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