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Made for Samsung exclusivity programme opens up to indie games

Samsung pledges to, "push your game to a very good audience," as it seeks to bolster its Galaxy App Store

Samsung is extending its mobile exclusivity programme to include indie games, offering a variety of free services to developers as it seeks to improve the content on its app store.

The "Made for Samsung" programme doesn't offer cash incentives for exclusivity. Rather, it offers developers payment in kind through services like free testing, analytics, operations and, crucially, promotion. Speaking at the Gamesbeat Summit yesterday, Samsung's VP of emerging platforms, Mihai Pohontu, referred to the problems around visibility on the iOS App Store and Google Play.

"Exclusivity for us can be time bound," he said, as reported by Yahoo! News. "We can continue to promote an app or game even after the exclusivity program is over. In the game industry, developers would normally find it hard to obtain Hero image featuring in the other app stores."

Samsung is no charity, of course, and the Made for Samsung programme has been one of the principal methods for populating its Galaxy Apps Store. Pohontu listed The Weather Channel and CNN as examples of established, respected companies that have partnered with Samsung in this way, and he claimed that exclusive apps receive, on average, 40,000 installs every month.

"We will push your game to a very good audience," he said. "We realise the biggest developers won't do this, but we are thinking of under-served areas of the world."

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Matthew Handrahan

Editor-in-Chief

Matthew Handrahan joined GamesIndustry in 2011, bringing long-form feature-writing experience to the team as well as a deep understanding of the video game development business. He previously spent more than five years at award-winning magazine gamesTM.