New Open Source Backend as a Services Platform for Game Developers

by Kin Lane on 02/01/2013

A new player in the Backend as a Service (BaaS) space has emerged, from former OpenFeint co-founder Peter Relan--called OpenKit. The new BaaS platform is targeting game developers, providing cross-platform tools for both iOS and Android. The core features of the gaming BaaS platform are:

Cloud data sync - Save game progress in the cloud with data storage. Sync it across both iOS and Android devices for a consistent gaming experience
Leaderboards - Drop-in leaderboard SDK's for both iOS and Android. Give your users the opportunity to compete against millions of other players
Facebook & Twitter auth - Users login with familiar third party social networks like Facebook and Twitter. No need to create and manage accounts. OpenKit handles it all
Cross-platform support - OpenKit supports both iOS and Android. Our native SDKs are lightweight and will take just a few minutes to integrate into your game

OpenKit represents a trend I’m tracking on where people are pulling together specialized or virtualized stacks targeting specific groups of developers. Early movers in the space like Kinvey, Parse and Cloudmine have generally catered to all types of developers by providing them a backend stack, that assists them in rapidly building mobile and web apps. So naturally the next step is to see more specialized stacks, for smaller groups of developers.

I’m stoked to see that OpenKit is completely open source, readily available on Github, as well as comes out of the box with a REST API. Open source BaaS is something I was identifying was missing from the space.

I will add OpenKit to my trends section for Backend as a Service, where I’m tracking on the BaaS space, and will dive in deeper and compare it with some of the other offerings we are seeing emerge.