Game Center, or as it has become known on our forums, “Shame Center" has been broken for months and months now. The thread on our forums surrounding what is simply called “The Game Center Bug" started last year, and we posted about it once it became apparent that this was becoming a widespread thing. Since then, some developers are gathering data to fix the problem while others are removing Game Center requirements from their games. It’s really pretty unbelievable that Game Center has been broken for so long, and it’s having a direct impact on the games we can even cover here on TouchArcade. The majority of us here can’t play games that require Game Center which… Well, sort of seems like a serious problem that you’d think would be fixed in iOS 9.3?
Following along with our community, it seems that for some people, updating to iOS 9.3 briefly fixed the problem before the white screen of Game Center death quickly returned. This raises the question of Will Game Center ever be fixed? You’d think that it’s someone’s job (or more accurately, an entire team of people’s job) to make sure Apple web services are working, and I’m just at a total loss as to how they can release a major iOS update without Game Center being one of the included fixes.
I’m at the point where I’m ready to say if Apple isn’t willing to make some kind of effort to fix Game Center, they should just shut it down completely. In the days before Game Center, there were more than a few Game Center-like services such as OpenFeint, Plus+ and others, all of which had more elaborate feature sets… But, better than that, they worked. Game Center effectively killed all these third party services overnight, leaving absolutely no alternative for developers who want this functionality in their games short of wholly rolling their own technology or relying on Game Center. Just think how awesome OpenFeint would be by now if Game Center never existed.
Anyway, as frustrating as this is for members of our community, it’s even more frustrating for us. I take no pleasure in responding to emails saying, “I’d love to post about your game, but we can’t even play it because of Game Center." At this point, I suppose our only real recourse is to just keep complaining about it in hopes that Apple listens. Maybe Taylor Swift needs to make a game so she can write another letter.
