While the Facebook-style developers are rapidly moving their games to mobile; the traditional mobile game providers are adopting the same old model, which is giving games for free and making their money from in-app purchases. The IAP system allows developers to process in-game transactions. However, most of them lack the virtual economy management system that is necessary to build profitable games.
Since OFX launched its private beta for Android, the game developers can now create and manage productive virtual economies in a simple and easy manner. Moreover, all of this without having to operate and build the servers themselves. OFX helps game providers to run complete virtual stores while selling and stocking virtual goods and currency, and at the same time analysing real-time performance, and even modifying inventory in a hurry.
The CEO and founder of OpenFeint, Jason Citron stated that IAP systems are similar to credit card machines, they are necessary when it comes to processing transactions, but they are somewhat useless if there is no store around it. Thus, OFX makes it very easy for any game developer to create that store and have confidence that it will be able to scale as they manage to snag millions of DAUs.
For the selected games to participate in the beta, OFX will be using Google’ IAP to process all of the payments. The future updates will be including support for alternative providers such as direct to carrier billers.
The CEO of Halfbrick Studios, Shainiel Deo stated that they would prefer to focus on creating better games rather than a very complex scalable server infrastructure. The iOS use of OFX is very easy, so they are excited to implement it on their upcoming Android games.
OpenFeint wants to build more games for Android. Last week the company announced that they will be launching a new distribution channel in China for Android games. It will be called The9 Game Zone. A few months ago OpenFeint announced a brand new strategic partnership with The9 to deliver games of excellent quality to Android through the $100m Fund9. OFX’s private beta will be open for a limited amount of time, and it will close as soon as every slot is filled.