OpenFeint Closes Down
Developers have until December 14th to migrate away from OpenFeint, at which point it’ll be offline forever. Even under normal circumstances this sort of deadline would be pretty crazy, but it’s especially insane now given the massive influx of developers working around the clock to get their apps and games submitted before the cutoff to have them approved and on the App Store before the iTunes holiday freeze.
This is why Apple had to do Game Center in the first place. They couldn’t have left a key feature of iOS, social gaming, at the mercy of a third-party.
This abrupt shutdown of OpenFeint is bad for developers, but it would be a lot worse if a first-party solution wasn’t in place.