Aurora Feint launches its platform to socialize Android games

Aurora Feint has made iPhone games much more social — and therefore easier to spread and monetize — with its OpenFeint social game platform. Now it intends to do the same for Android-based mobile games.

The Burlingame, Calif. company announced that the OpenFeint platform is available for Android games beginning today. In the next month, more than 20 games will launch on Android with OpenFeint. The platform makes games more social, adding leaderboards, achievements, friend requests, and multiplayer gaming. On top of that, Aurora Feint is launching a new Feint Spotlight App, which helps draw more attention to a game.

The discovery of games by top developers is important, since there is a flood of titles available by the tens of thousands. With so much clutter, users are having trouble finding quality apps and developers are having an equally tough time getting their content noticed.

Jason Citron, chief executive of Aurora Feint, said in an interview that Android’s rapid growth made this a good time to create a cross-platform version of OpenFeint, which now is used in games that have reached 37 million players on the iPhone. But Android, the mobile operating system created by Google, is growing fast with more than 200,000 phone activations every day.

Aurora Feint’s initial set of Android games will include Dot (by developer Ustwo), Fruit Ninja (Halfbrick Studios), MiniSquadron (Supermono), Super Slyder (Sandlot Games), The Moron Test (DistinctDev, Inc.), and Tic Tac Toe (Posimotion). Aurora Feint will offer these games to major wireless carriers as part of a partnership where OpenFeint will regularly bring high-quality games to Android as candidates for featuring. So far, more than 3,000 games are using OpenFeint, which launched 18 months ago on the iPhone. Developers create their games using Aurora Feint’s software development kit; that allows them to tap the OpenFeint cross-promotion network.

“We’re partnering with developers and wireless carriers to bring the best iPhone games to Android,” said Jason Citron, CEO of Aurora Feint. Citron said OpenFeint will help fix the Android system, improving the viral spread of games from friend to friend as well as the ability to make money from games through Aurora Feint’s own monetization system. He said his company would add seven to nine games a week to its roster of Android titles.

While Apple has a lot of smartphone market share now and has an even larger share of app revenues, that won’t last as operating systems such as Android and Windows Mobile 7 and Palm WebOS catch on.

As previously announced, gamers will now be able to challenge their friends in multiplayer games across platforms, so that an iPhone gamer can play in the same game as an Android gamer.

Aurora Feint is backed by investors DeNA and The9. Rivals include Scoreloop and PapayaMobile.

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