RIM acquires Scoreloop, a social gaming startup

ScoreloopRIM on Tuesday announced it had acquired social gaming companyScoreloop. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Scoreloop’s focus is to help mobile game developers with adding social elements and in-app billing to their apps. Now the company will expand its focus to help BlackBerry’s application platform with incorporating those features and with the difficult task of catching up BlackBerry’s app abilities to that of its peers.

“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,” RIM wrote on the Inside BlackBerry Developer’s Blog. “We look forward to working with the team at 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.”

Scoreloop did not offer a BlackBerry version of its SDK before the announcement, but Marc Gumpinger, Scoreloop’s CEO, said on its homepage that the company’s future BlackBerry solution “will be unparalleled.” It also surprisingly noted that the company will still offer a “cross platform approach” to assist developers from many platforms to make gaming more social.

The move is important if RIM intends to stimulate app development and it’s likely RIM will use Scoreloop’s SDK to improve its BBM social platform. At this point, RIM’s BlackBerry game and app offerings appear dramatically behind those of Apple’s iOS, Google’s Android, and Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7.

Even with the BlackBerry Playbook tablet selling surprisingly well, every move RIM makes looks like it’s playing catch up instead of moving mobile technology forward.

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