Google’s Android cell phone software hasn’t gotten a lot of love from the game industry, which favors the Apple iPhone at the moment. But with an eye to the future, Scoreloop said today that it is extending its social game platform to Android.
Scoreloop helps make mobile games more social, adding services such as multiplayer challenges, leaderboards, achievements and cross-promotion. It offers this Core Social technology as a white label service that game makers can integrate into their own games, and it makes its money through virtual currency sales, since it charges players virtual coins for multiplayer challenges.
If developers use the Scoreloop technology for their games, then users could see interesting benefits, where a player with an iPhone could play against a player with an Android phone. Scoreloop competes with a variety of other infrastructure players, including Ngmoco’s Plus+ service, Aurora Feint’s OpenFeint, and Sibblingz’ new cross-platform game development tools.
Vishal Gondal, chief executive of Indiagames, is one of Scoreloop’s clients. He said he was excited about Scoreloop’s plan to extend the game discovery features of Core Social to the Android platform. But Gameloft, one of the biggest makers of mobile games, recently said it was scaling back its investment in Android games because it made so much more money on iPhone games. That shows that while Scoreloop is betting on Android’s success, not everybody believes Android will do well.
Scoreloop was founded in 2008 and has 20 employees. It raised $2.8 million in its most recent round of funding.