Apple’s Game Center: More Opportunities for Social Games Developers

Most of the initial buzz surrounding Apple’s announcement on Thursday of its new operating system, iPhone OS 4, centered on the support for multitasking. While this feature has been long anticipated by users and developers alike, another important but less discussed aspect of the update involves Apple’s Game Center – a social gaming network to be launched for iPhone and iPod Touch later this summer. Similar to the networks already prevalent in console gaming, Apple’s Game Center will allow friend invitations and multiplayer game-play and will include matchmaking and high-score tracking.

The Game Center may be Apple’s attempt to compete with Facebook’s dominance over the hugely popular and incredibly lucrative area of social gaming. A report released this week suggested that the gaming company Zynga, maker of six of the seven most popular social games, is worth over $5 billion.

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