"Rumours of Game Center hurting OpenFeint exaggerated"

OpenFeint boss Peter Relan has rubbished speculation that the launch of Apple's Game Center for iOS has impeded the social mobile platform's success.

The OpenFeint layer is currently used by 3800 games - a figure which has risen by 119 per cent since the launch of Game Center this Summer. Its user based has jumped from 22 million to 50 million during that time.

"We are very pleasantly surprised," Relan told VentureBeat. "The beauty of achieving scale is the market decides. Not you, not me, not Apple. Rumors of Apple Game Center hurting OpenFeint are greatly exaggerated."

Relan argued that OpenFeint worked on top of, rather than instead of, Game Center, and that it provided "a direct channel from the player to the developer" which Game Center did not. "We have something so fundamental to developers and they refuse to give it up."

Fishlabs CEO Michael Schade claimed the social platform had played a part in making the developer's latest title an App Store success. "We used Game Center and OpenFeint's social features to push Galaxy on Fire 2 to the top of the Top Grossing charts in iTunes in less than two weeks."

OpenFeint also allows cross-platform communication and features between iOS and Android users.