Scoreloop Brings Social Gaming To iPhone

By Alicia Ashby On April 16, 2009 · Leave a Comment

Today Scoreloop announced its mobile social gaming platform, which adds support for virtual currency, leaderboards, and other community features to pre-existing iPhone games. The service is compatible with any game that results in a high score and is designed around the idea of getting users to compete against each other for both leaderboard points and the Coins virtual currency.

Scoreloop is designed to encourage players to compete in multiplayer challenges where each user must wager at least one Coin. The challenge's winner gets all of the wagered coins as his or her prize, which can then be used to issue more challenges. Users in particular can issue challenges in games that friends don't already own, which is intended to drive discovery of older iPhone apps.

While winning gamers earn Coins through gameplay, a player who loses
frequently can run out of their initial allotment of Coins quickly. If
this happens, the user must spend real money to obtain more Coins. The Scoreloop SDK is free, but monetizes through a 50/50 revenue share (after cost) between Scoreloop and the original app developers. Revenue share is based on how many Coins are spent in a given developer's app.

In the future Scoreloop hopes to support games running on Android and Java ME, as well as major non-mobile game engines. Right now issue of challenges is based on importing a user's iPhone contact lists as well as contact lists for social networks like Facebook. Scoreloop hopes to grow its app (and drive traffic to developer apps) through viral spread, similar to the way Facebook games pick up new users.

Scoreloop is an interesting proposition, but it must be wondered how the company is getting this to fly on iPhone where supposedly microtransactions were restricted to paid apps and only non-currency items. It seems possible that Scoreloop may be using payment methods other than Apple's in-app transactions, since the 50/50 after costs revenue share on top of Apple's 70/30 split would probably leave precious little left for app developer's.

All told Scoreloop feels reminiscent of Gamewager, and Scoreloop CEO Marc Gumpinger has stated that eventually gamers will be able to redeem Coins for some sort of prizes to VGN. A mobile Gamewager equivalent encouraging gamers to spend more time in titles they've already bought and encouraging adoption of older games seems like a win/win prospect for iPhone developers if the service takes off. Right now Scoreloop says it's in talk with several major and minor iPhone developers about implementation.