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Scoreloop introduces mobile, online community

Scoreloop, a mobile social gaming platform, has launched Scoreloop Community which includes a Web presence and an application in the Apple App store.

Both aspects of the Scoreloop community are fully integrated with the Scoreloop platform which merges the worlds of gaming and social networking to help the viral spread of games in benefit of everyone involved. By connecting gamers through online scoreboards and player challenges, the Scoreloop Community increases the visibility of games and customer loyalty.

"This adds a new dimension of serendipity," said Marc Gumpinger, CEO at Scoreloop, Munich, Germany. "It makes games even more fun to play, leads to discovering new games and provides more reach and visibility for game developers and publishers."

"With Scoreloop, gaming ultimately turns into social interactions that are a lot more fun than typing weird text messages," he said.

On the iPhone implementation of Scoreloop Community, users have the luxury of push notifications on any of the Scoreloop enabled games right as they come out.

Scoreloop's iPhone Community is free and is the only platform that offers users online high scores and player challenges for any iPhone and iPod touch game from OS 2.0 and up.

Scoreloop's player challenges offering allows gamers to interact in their favorite environment without having to leave their game of choice to send out SMS text messages.

"Playing against others is the natural way of playing games," Mr. Gumpinger said. "So far it just wasn't possible or very hard to achieve. With Scoreloop developers just drop in a few lines of code into their existing games to allow for player challenges.

"Players then can choose opponents from a great variety of sources: be it from Scoreloop's online high score lists, from the built in address book or challenging your Facebook buddies," he said.

Scoreloop also ensures that players only challenge other gamers with similar skill levels.

Scoreloop Community also comes with medals and Coins awarded to high-performing gamers who can then use the coins for challenges.

In order to enter a challenge, each gamer must put at least one of their coins on winning.

"For this reason, we can offer Scoreloop free for developers without showing ads," Mr. Gumpinger said. "And what is more: we even share these revenues with the developers so they can even monetize free games. This is a major shift towards gaming-as-a-service.

"In contrast to other virtual currencies, however, Scoreloop allows gamers to win their Coins from challenges instead of purely having to pay for it," he said.

"And gamers also greatly benefit from using Coins in challenges, too. If there was no value to a challenge, your opponent would simply drop out if they saw that they're about to lose. This would render the entire challenge feature useless."

Scoreloop Community also allows users to edit and save avatars, promote and view popular games, and stay in touch with what their friends are up to in the gaming world.

On the iPhone, push notifications come fully equipped with Scoreloop Community, alerting the gamer whenever he or she is being challenged.

"This is the revolution for the way we think about the usage of the Internet and its role in helping us through our daily activities," Mr. Gumpinger said. "'Mobile' no longer refers to a cell phone anymore.

"With the iPhone and its apps -- and games are the major app category -- voice has been marginalized," he said. "It's all about services. And Scoreloop is the leading service for the leading app category. And for us, this is just the beginning."