As you may have heard, the OpenFeint social gaming network closes its doors on December 14th. With just 30 days notice given, we’ve been rushing to update our old iOS games; removing OpenFeint and, where appropriate, replacing it with Apple’s own Game Center network. It’s bad news for those of you who’ve been racking up the OpenFeint points, but a good excuse to revisit old classics and re-earn your achievements on the new service. Approvals are going through, so check your game library for updates!

Veteran iOS gamers will remember that OpenFeint was the pioneering iOS social network, bringing easy to implement global leaderboards, achievements, friends lists, and challenges to the platform – read Jas Austin’s Pocket Gamer interview from OpenFeint’s early days. Demand for OpenFeint and similar services led to the development of Apple’s Game Center, which took a while to catch up in both features and popularity. Sentinel developer Paul Jackman says:

“We were very early adopters of Openfeint’s SDK, first integrating it into Sentinel 2, and then subsequently putting it in all of our games. Over the years we have been very impressed both with the features and services they provided to us and the willingness of Jason Citron and his team to listen to feedback and feature requests to make our games better.

We built up a strong working relationship, and it was great to be offered some of their newest features early such as challenges and Game Feed. However, after Apple’s own Game Center was released it was surely inevitable that users would drop their support for third party add ons, so we all knew this day would come. We’ll certainly be interested to see what ex-Openfeint staff bring to the industry next!”

Want to reminisce about OpenFeint, good or bad? Leave a comment!