Social Gaming Platforms

I have an application on my Droid X that my son just loves, called Kongregate Arcade (Figure 5-5). This application is actually several games, and each of them could easily be an application of its own. I am pretty amazed at what my son can find there sometimes, and yet this is just one of several third-party social gaming platforms available on the Android Market.

Figure 5-5. The home screen for Kongregate Arcade. It isn’t just one gaming application, but many. If you have a gaming application, it might be wise to join a social gaming platform like this.

The format of Kongregate is like the Market itself. The user can choose from a variety of games by category, and then download them to their Android device quite quickly. One that I downloaded even used some cross-promotion at the very beginning, when I selected “more games.”

Many of these social gaming platforms have various game services available, including multiplayer games, leaderboards, chat, and achievements. These provide easy ways to get people to talk about your gaming applications.