The best way to encourage participation? By turning everything into a competition, of course. Tapping into the human penchant for contests, Samsung has launched its Tizen App Challenge. It’s the latest effort by the Korean company to persuade game developers to launch their creations, and it comes with cash prizes for developers who manage to produce popular games.
While Samsung began launching smartphones running Tizen, an operating system based on the Linux kernel, last year in India, the company has found that consumers are spending very little money on games in the Tizen Store. That’s despite the relative popularity of the Z1 and Z3 devices in the country, as well as the Samsung Z2, which is a cheaper option to other Android phones on the market. India is Tizen’s primary market, and while the contest is open to participants worldwide, its initial goal is to incentivize game developers to make games for the Indian market that are, well, worth buying.
According to Ravi Belwal of Samsung, any developer who has designed a game with Unity that is installed by more than 10,000 people is eligible to enter this contest. The game makers only need to port their creations to Tizen and offer it up in the Tizen Store.
“We think the market is ripe for games in India and we’d like to prove it,” Belwal said. “It’s an emerging market. This is the first time for us in trying to start a new market this way. Samsung has half the market in smartphones in India, and our growth rate is good.”
The first 50 apps to simply make their way onto the store will receive $3,000 each, while the game that is the most popular during the download count period (which runs from the app’s first date of sale to November 21), will win its developer an impressive $20,000. The second most popular app will get $10,000, and third place comes in at $5,000. That means there’s actually a sizable $185,000 in prizes available — not a shabby pie from which to take a slice.
So if you’re sitting on a great game idea, this may just be the time to try it out.
