Aurora Feint announced today that it continues to expand its OpenFeint iPhone social gaming platform in Japan, where it has picked up a major game publishing partner.
Today, Burlingame, Calif.-based Aurora Feint added its second major Japanese game publisher, Taito, to the OpenFeint platform. OpenFeint is a developer platform that makes it easy for iPhone game makers to add leaderboards, challenges, and other social elements to their iPhone games.
OpenFeint is akin to Microsoft’s Xbox Live online game service on the consoles, except OpenFeint is used in more than 750 iPhone games with 8.5 million users. Taito is a big win for OpenFeint, since the Japanese company will use the platform in well-known titles such as Space Invaders and other Taito franchises. Open Feint is already being used in Space Invaders and Space Invaders Infinity Gene on the iPhone. Other titles, Bust-a-Move and Arkanoid, will soon follow. Taito is a division of Square Enix Holdings.
Taito is also a partner of DeNA, which has 15-plus million users in Japan for its mobile social networking service, Mogabe-town. DeNA invested in Aurora Feint last fall. Peter Relan, chairman of Aurora Feint, said in an interview that the DeNA relationship is helping the company score more customers for the OpenFeint platform. Aurora Feint competes with Scoreloop and Ngmoco’s Plus+ platform.
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