Chinese online gaming firm The9 has made a strategic minority equity investment in Aurora Feint Inc., an American mobile game developer.

Jun Zhu, The9's chairman and CEO, stated: "We are confident of the prospect for this mobile platform and believe it will play an important role in the future development of global mobile internet. The investment in Aurora Feint is an important step of The9's establishment of a mobile gaming platform and is also an integral part of our global strategy."

Neither Aurora Feint nor The9 have divulged the monetary value of the investment.

Based in Burlingame, California, Aurora Feint Inc. develops mobile games and operates OpenFeint, a leading mobile social platform and application for smartphones, OpenFeint includes a set of online game services such as leaderboards and achievements running in a cloud based web service operated by Aurora Feint Inc. OpenFeint's developer SDK is a toolkit that can be integrated in any iPhone based game. Thousands of mobile game developers use OpenFeint and there are more than 28 million registered users and 2,200 games live in the Apple App Store. OpenFeint also announced OpenFeint X in 2010, which is a virtual goods management system that enables developers to build free-to-play social games for mobile phones.