Heyzap (YC W09) Brings Social Discovery And Check-In For Games To The iPhone
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
This is the reason casual game reviewing has never been anywhere near as valuable as in the traditional market. People just don't need to read a review about a free game before trying it, they can just sink 5 minutes in and see how it is.
The other aspect of this product is also underwhelming; the check-ins. You're essentially trying to gamify... well, games. A good game will have more than enough intrinsic rewards that layering these extrinsic ones on top will add little value in my opinion.
Social discovery is not just about social proof but also about getting signal from noise. With 70k games and growing knowing what games your friends are playing is a great way of decided what games to try out. Price cost of games may be low but no one has time to try them all out.
Check-ins are more of a broadcast mechanism rather than a gamifying one. Some users check-in for badges but a lot do it for broadcasting to the community. We are going to be providing more value to check-ins by also recommending games from them. Did you get a chance to try it out?
You're right, no one has time to try every game released; however don't you feel that the generic store rankings already do a pretty good job filtering out the noise? I'm not saying your product will have no value, just that for me personally I can't see it being a huge improvement over the existing filtering mechanism (genre specific app store ranking).