The iOS ecosystem has been no stranger to competitive social gaming platforms, with the likes of OpenFeint and Apple’s own Game Center striving to become the mobile equivalent of Xbox Live. Whilst these alternatives have been packed with features and, at times, completely ubiquitous across the App store, each of these social platforms share the same unfortunate quality – they no longer exist. We’re still waiting for our own iOS Xbox Live…or, at least, we were. As we reported back in February, and even all the way back in 2014, Microsoft have today announced that a cross-platform software development kit will be released to mobile game developers, allowing them to implement the complete suite of Xbox Live features into their iOS and Android titles.
In an interview with The Verge, Microsoft’s gaming cloud chief Kareem Choudhry underlined the company’s core aim of ‘uniting all [Microsoft’s] communities together with a consistent singular experience’ – and it’s hard to say that such a move is unexpected. Even from the early days of the App Store, Microsoft have made steps to integrate their Xbox brand into mobile gaming, with an official Xbox Live app, in-game achievements for their own published titles, and most recently a fully-fledged streaming program in Project xCloud. The mobile version of Minecraft ($6.99) has even featured the version of Xbox Live that Microsoft are now offering to developers since 2...