Thirdparty social gaming apocalypse averted: Apple will matchmake but won't host

Picking through the details of Apple's iPhone 4.0 OS release, developers have uncovered a couple of important points.

The most notable concerns the much vaunted Game Centre social gaming technology.

While it handles features such as matchmaking, Apple doesn't actually host games. Instead it hands off such annoying infrastructure issues to developers.

This is big difference compared to the likes of Microsoft's Xbox Live, which for most companies is run on dedicated Microsoft servers to ensure overall performance.

Significantly this also creates a huge opportunity for thirdparty technologies such as OpenFeint, Plus+ and Scoreloop, who have sunk considerable resources in their global server set up.

The vast majority of iPhone developers just don't have the resources to handle this themselves, so will make the most of the unifying potential of Game Center by signing up to one of the existing solutions.

In terms of the detail specified in Apple's documentation, Game Center users must register once with the service before using it and log into Game Center before playing games, but it does allow you to be anonymous as you can specify an alias or handle. Players can set a status as with Skype or Facebook.

Game Center supports two types of multiplayer - peer-to-peer (i.e. wi-fi or Bluetooth) - features already supported within iPhone OS 3.x, - and hosted, which developers have to host themselves, or use the same thirdparty services as they're currently using.