Research In Motion has acquired a social gaming company, Scoreloop, which may help the BlackBerry maker to integrate social media into its apps running on both its smartphones and the PlayBook tablet.
The social gaming software from Scoreloop helps other developers integrate social media features in their apps — for the BlackBerry users it means they can see features like Facebook and Twitter connections, virtual currency and in-app purchases within their mobile games.
“We’re excited that the Scoreloop team is joining the BlackBerry Developer team and bringing their expertise in creating social and collaborative gaming toolkits for mobile developers to the BlackBerry platform. Scoreloop is a pioneer in mobile social gaming and offers a customisable and cross-platform social mobile gaming developer tool kit,” RIM said in an official blog.
Scoreloop’s software works across all platforms, and it’s not yet clear whether RIM will allow it to continue supporting other platforms or not.
The gaming startup has in fact built a complete gaming ecosystem as well as gaming communities aimed at producing revenues from mobile games. RIM is clearly trying to cover the gap it has with the iOS and Android devices, especially after the lacklustre response received by the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet in the market. The Canadian handset maker was probably drawn into the deal with Scoreloop because the later had in App billing capabilities which the former was lacking.
The RIM developer blog post further said that, “The company had recently enabled the developers to create social app experiences through BBM (BlackBerry Messenger) social platform and have seen some very innovative applications result from that.”
The company expected Scoreloop to “provide tools that will further enable our developer community to take gaming to a new level of social integration on the Blackberry platform.”
Some of multiplayer games on BlackBerry platform which may benefit from Scoreloop acquisition include BrickBreaker, Marcala, GT Blackjack, GT Roulette, Texas Hold’ em, Age of Heroes, World of Dragons and Jogamo Chess.