How I love Leaderboards

It's true. I have a love for Leaderboards. High scores are a thing that make me Tick. I also believe whole heartedly that it makes other peoples hearts tick as well. I have always loved High scores on arcade machines. way back when i used to spend a LOT of time in the arcades trouncing scores that I would see, and if not yet able, work on making sure I was top dog.

I have posted before that I will not do any more Xblig games while i do not have access to the leaderboards. I am gonna stick to this, even though i really want to code one or more of my designs for the Xbox.

Now I am coding the Android, and once my license is sorted I will be doing the same for the iOS too. I now HAVE access to leaderboards thanks to Scoreloop. The integration with Marmalade is pretty neat, even though I was a bit slow to get the whole thing working. Still now it is working and I am just putting the finishing touches to some popup dialogs i am really happy. (side note, Scoreloop can do so much more than just leaderboards).

Scoreloop is allowing me to really get into something I love. Competition. Faceless competition that pits man vs man vs woman vs kid and anything else that wants in on playing the game. Now this could all end up being a huge disappointment if this leaderboard doesn't accumulate many scores. It may look like a complete fail then. Time will tell, and as I have only had approximately 1300 downloads to this point, I might not have a huge leaderboard. Then again, maybe I consider 1000 users in my leaderboard for my game a Huge win (Actually I do).

I will compare this possible number of entries with the game 'A Shooter' that I did as my last game on the Xbox. I had to use a Viral leaderboard passing mechanism and I have to say that I barely made 100 scores in the table. Even though I had over 1000 purchases. It is just not a great system really. The main thing is that 1000 entries will make me very happy.

I wonder what could have happened if my Xbox games had included real leaderboards. I feel sure the games would have done better, simply as friends tell friends they got this great score and are top of the leaderboard etc. Then there is also the reverse side of things, this is where you see a huge score on the leaderboard and go WOW, someone owned, I bet i can do the same. Either way it is a huge win for the designer/developer.

When i finally get this Hot Chicks game out on the iOS platform I will be able to compare retention of players compareed to the Android version which is about to get it's second update to add this feature. Whereas the iOS will go out first time featuring leaderboards.

It will be interesting to see how they compare.

Laters
Da Voodoochief

NOTE: I want to say that I had a problem with Scoreloop and opened a private support ticket. It was serviced very fast several times over a couple of days till my issue was resolved. I think this support was truly awesome. I have no name with scoreloop yet, no existing games with their SDK that I have not even paid for, yet their support was excellent. TY Scoreloop.