Best Buy and Hooked Media have launched a competition to find the best Android mobile game developers, and VentureBeat is helping out. The Get Discovered! competition will give the winner and finalists distribution on mobile platforms, media recognition and seed funding from Trinity Ventures.
The point of the contest is to find talented developers, who are a scarce commodity these days as competition in the mobile gaming market heats up. Contests of all kinds are emerging as one way that big companies and venture firms try to find the next Angry Birds. Also, as the number of games available on the Android Market soars past 200,000, discovery is becoming a key issue for developers too
The winner will also receive a $5,000 online ad package from VentureBeat.
The competition is open to all game developers, who submit their games by first integrating with Hooked Media‘s discovery platform. During the first part of the competition, the platform will track metrics including user rating, play time, and installations based on recommendations. The metrics will be used to determine the finalists. Then the judges will analyze the finalists.
The judges will be Bradley Horowitz, vice president of product for, Google+; Gus Tai, General Partner at Trinity Ventures; Dean Takahashi (yes, that’s me), lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat; and Margita Labhard, Director of Digital Business Models at Best Buy.
Hooked Media’s platform helps developers increase their game plays and gamers can use it to find new games based on their actual gaming preferences. Semi-finalists will get distribution from Best Buy. Developers can submit their games from now until Jan. 24, 2012. The judging period will run from Jan. 24 to Feb. 24, and the competition will culminate in an event at Dolores Labs in San Francisco in March 2012.