The business of app discovery is still a wide-open game, with dozens of companies coming at it from different directions: among them, StumbleUpon is building on its web heritage, AppAware tracks what people are installing and removing, Freeappaday and Tapzilla focus on free deals, while Chomp and Flurry have search algorithms behind them. And there are the app stores themselves. Now you can add a new one to the mix: mobile games distribution platform OpenFeint is today launching Game Channel, a Groupon-style service to distribute mobile gaming apps.
Game Channel is an app that offers users one free game per day. (Developers use the service to promote their games and drive downloads.) This service isn’t actually new: it also existed in Game Spotlight, the predecessor to Game Channel.
The new element, which OpenFeint calls Fire Sale, is a based on a group-buying model: Every week, Fire Sale features a premium game, normally priced at $1.99 to $9.99, and promotes the game to the app’s 50 million users. If enough users vote to get the game, the price of the game drops. OpenFeint says it will send push notifications to alert users to the dropping price.
The first game to come up for Fire Sale treatment is Jaws, developed by Bytemark Games. (Note that the picture to the right shows that it’s already achieved half the votes needed to drop in price, but in actual fact the Fire Sale won’t begin until Friday, December 17.)
OpenFeint says it is used by 50 million people and has “a presence” in more than 3,800 games. The service has in the past been used by developers keen to drive downloads for their games to get them higher rankings on Apple’s wider app store charts, while for users, it represents a way to discover new apps, without having to invest much money or time in the process.
Still the rise of so many discovery stores leads one to wonder whether there will be an app to help discover the best one for user’s needs.
OpenFeint’s parent Aurora Feint in October closed out an $8 million investment round, and is backed by companies including Intel (NSDQ: INTC) Capital, Japanese mobile social networking and virtual goods giant DeNA, and Chinese online gaming company The9.

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