A company called Aurora Feint wants its share of the ever-growing social gaming market, currently dominated by companies such as Crowdstar and Zynga. But instead of releasing their own game, they’re out with a developer tool called OpenFeint X to allow third parties to make social games for the iPhone users.
Launched in private beta with strategic partner DeNa Group, OpenFeint X is made to help develop free-to-play iPhone games and includes support for virtual goods (along with microtransactions), chat wall and newsfeed.
Core services of the platform are free for developers, but there are also premium services that include the cloud infrastructure, detailed analytics, virtual goods store management, game-centric wallet and support for downloadable game assets.
After the private beta ends, OpenFeint X will be rolled out to the general public in phases over the next few months.
And in case you didn’t know (I didn’t), the existing OpenFeint platform already powers social gaming services for 12 million users and is growing at a pace of 25% per month.