DEVELOPERS BLOG

Jam Asia 2013: JAM824 – Taking Your Apps and Games Social with BBM and Scoreloop SDKs

GAME DEVELOPMENT / 09.12.13 / chrissm1

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With such a large number of apps in BlackBerry World these days, standing out from the crowd is more important than ever. Thankfully, the engineers at BlackBerry have been hard at work determining ways to leverage the benefits of the platform and the social nature of BlackBerry customers. At BlackBerry Jam Asia, we’re hosting a session titled “JAM824 – Take Your Apps and Games Social with BBM and Scoreloop SDKs,” which will go into detail on how to implement certain techniques to make your apps and games go viral with the BBM Social Platform and the Scoreloop Social Gaming SDKs. (You can view session details and more BlackBerry Jam Asia sessions here.)

With 60 million monthly active users, BBM is a vibrant social network that is immediate and trusted by its users. Given its viral growth and the fact that 60 percent of users send messages on a daily basis, the ability to tie into the BBM network with native API access is a significant differentiator.  Using this SDK, developers are able to update a user’s BBM profile to let their friends know about their app usage, integrate chat functionality, share content and allow users to invite their contacts to download an app directly from BlackBerry World. All of this enables developers to increase discoverability, engagement, monetization and app stickiness.

In a similar vein, the Scoreloop SDK allows developers to avoid re-inventing the wheel by integrating gamer profiles and leaderboards alongside awards and achievements. Creating a social gaming experience is now easier than ever by using this white-label SDK, ensuring that you can maintain the look and feel of your content throughout the whole experience. With modular features, you get to choose which components of the framework make sense for your game, and have full control over what to include. Additionally, since the Scoreloop SDK is available as a cross-platform solution, you no longer need to worry about having fragmented gamer communities to maintain.

With BBM and Scoreloop social integration, BlackBerry provides a clear way to stand out from the vast number of apps in BlackBerry World, and enables a straightforward way to meet the service integration criteria for the Built for BlackBerry designation. I look forward to hopefully seeing you in Hong Kong at BlackBerry Jam Asia later this month to continue the conversation around how you can build a business on BlackBerry 10!

Christopher Saunders leads the Developer Relations activities for BlackBerry in Australia and New Zealand, and is based out of Sydney.  He can be reached on Twitter via @csaunders_ca.

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