iPhone social network makers welcome Apple's Game Center

You'd think that the company's behind the iPhone's existing third-party social gaming networks would be shaking in their boots over Apple's announcement yesterday of Game Center, a social gaming network that will be integrated into the next iPhone operating system. Surprisingly, though, those companies are saying publicly that they're ready to welcome Game Center with open arms.

VentureBeat has a good round up of recent public statements from the makers of iPhone social gaming networks OpenFeint, Plus+ and Scoreloop, and they're all invariably excited about Apple's arrival on the social gaming scene. NGmoco chief publishing officer Simon Jeffrey even went so far as to say Game Center will " clean up the social space on the iPhone, which has become confusing and cluttered to consumers due to the number of social gaming networks vying for attention." Uh, hey, Jeffrey... someone ought to tell you that you're part of the problem Apple is solving there.

Of course, not everyone is sure Apple is providing the ideal solution. Scoreloop's Marc Gumpinger seems confident that his company's product "with its virtual goods architecture and in-game monetization fully in effect," goes much farther than Apple's more basic offering. Gumpinger even boasts that his company's "infrastructure enables any developer to be the next Zynga - and that on the even bigger scale with billions of handsets in the mobile market." We don't know that such grand predictions really apply to any company, but we're willing to admit that the Zynga of the mobile gaming space is just waiting to be found.