OpenFeint was a social platform for mobile games for devices that ran Android and/or iOS. It was developed by Aurora Feint, a company named after a video game by the same developers. The platform consisted of an SDK for use by games, allowing its various social networking features to be integrated into the game's functionality. OpenFeint was discontinued at the end of 2012.
History
OpenFeint was founded by Jason Citron. The first iteration of OpenFeint was launched on February 17, 2009. Version 2.0 was released in June 2009, and marked the first time that the platform was free for developers to integrate into their own applications. Harris Tsim joined to help with engineering. Version 2.1 was released on August 14, 2009, featuring "Social challenges", which allowed users to create tasks for themselves and their friends to attempt within games and notified users when new challenges were available. It also allowed users to add "Friends" and introduced a new user interface. Version 2.4 was released on January 8, 2010, with a revamped layout and a standalone OpenFeint app. As of January 2010, there were over 900 applications in the iOS App Store that use OpenFeint, and there were over ten million users registered on the network. On September 15, 2010, OpenFeint announced that it would be supporting Android. The9 invested $5 million in the platform, and in October, Intel Capital announced that it had invested $3 million, combining with DeNA's $6 million investment to bring total investments to $12 million. In April 2011, Japanese company GREE, Inc. bought OpenFeint for US$104 million. In 2011, OpenFeint was party to a class action suit with allegations including computer fraud, invasion of privacy, breach of contract, bad faith and seven other statutory violations. According to a news report "OpenFeint's business plan included accessing and disclosing personal information without authorization to mobile-device application developers, advertising networks and web-analytic vendors that market mobile applications". On November 16, 2012, GREE announced that it would be discontinuing the service on December 14, 2012, primarily in favor of its own similar platform.
Notable applications
The following is a list of some of the many applications that used or were integrated with OpenFeint:
Jason Citron, founder of OpenFeint, in 2012, used the money from GREE buying OpenFeint to create the indie game development studio Hammer & Chisel. In 2015 Hammer & Chisel created a new voice chat application called Discord. Discord has over 100 employees, and 130 million users. Jason Citron is the current CEO of Discord.
