The news that Apple is working on a unified social gaming solution for the iPhone, titled Game Center, brought joy to many handheld gamers. But what of ngmoco? As oneof Apple's favorite iPhone developers, the company introduced a service called Plus+ a while back which seemed to offer up the same sort of Xbox Live-style features on the iPhone. Now with Apple offering up a first party social gaming option, Plus+ appears to have been left out in the cold. Or has it? Simon Jeffery, the Chief Publishing Officer of ngmoco, released a statement which actually seems supportive of Game Center, saying that the company saw the writing on the wall and altered Plus+ in anticipation:

"Game Center is an exciting First Party innovation for the ecosystem that reinforces much of what plus+ has already accomplished and proven out early in its life cycle. It will effectively 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. ngmoco has anticipated this move from Apple for some time, and is happy to see a cleaner developer and consumer experience on the horizon.

"As we demonstrated at the recent GDC, plus+ took a strategic shift in direction a few months ago toward being a service, and less about being a set of social gaming features. plus+ is all about empowering monetization and discoverability mechanisms for the development community, and we have clearly demonstrated with games like We Rule that these mechanisms work. ngmoco actually reorganized our corporate structure earlier this year to reflect this expectation – with Jason Oberfest now running the development of plus+ as a service. Jason has unprecedented experience and success in this field, having previously done the same at My Space."

We've seen this shift as ngmoco has opted for free-to-play games, using Plus+ as a means of selling in-game currency for real dollars and offering up ad-supported games. Seems like these features could be accomplished through Game Center, but Simon Jeffery implies that Plus+ still offers something unique to the iPhone gaming space.

We'll have to wait and see whether ngmoco's service goes the way of the dodo at the launch of Game Center. Apple's service currently has no release date, apart from "later this year."