NOV. 19, 2012 • On Nov. 16, smartphone developers started receiving notices from GREE that the latter was terminating servers of the cross-platform mobile social network OpenFeint on Dec. 14. GREE acquired OpenFeint in 2011 for $104 million. Previous to this announcement GREE had told developers of its intention to migrate all users to its own platform, but OpenFeint servers would be maintained until at least the third quarter of 2013, although with no new features and only critical bug updates made. No new games have been enabled on the network since July, but many older iOS and Android titles still used the service. GREE suggests that coding support for its platform can be implemented in a week or less, yet it is doubtful that many developers with legacy titles will devote time and resources to make the changes given other priorities in the month before Christmas. If older games made significant use of OpenFeint services, and they are not updated for the GREE platform, users could find those games crashing after Dec. 14.
Impact: Three years ago OpenFeint was on the cutting edge of mobile social networks alongside Scoreloop, Chillingo, and Ngmoco. There was a crying need for something like Xbox Live for mobile, and OpenFeint was one of the major start-ups that rose to the challenge with a cross-platform solution. Why GREE decided to truncate its user migration schedule for OpenFeint has yet to be explained. Perhaps many developers were ignoring the mandate and GREE wanted to give them a reason to move more swiftly. Most mobile titles are flash-in-the-pans that are often forgotten by consumers, which leaves little incentive for small studios to devote scarce resources to going back and coding in support for GREE. And with no feature upgrades in OpenFeint this last year, there seems to be a lot more developer interest in supporting Apple’s Game Center, at least for iOS titles. When we talked with OpenFeint’s Jason Citron in late 2010, the network had amassed 50 million users and was growing that base 18% every month. GREE is the second-largest platform in Japan and has aspirations to become a big player internationally. Part of the expansion was the company’s push into the United States with the purchase of Funzio and OpenFeint. The latter’s burgeoning user base in North America was obviously enticing, and GREE was most interested in acquiring these consumers for its own purposes. OpenFeint the platform was just as obviously expendable. While GREE has been aggressive in trying to attract developers directly to its own platform, it appears more could have been done to reach out to developers already committed to OpenFeint. The December server shutdown with little notice just goes to further accentuate the point.
