WildTangent Games is a website that offers games through their site for temporary play and, should you enjoy the game and want to keep playing, you will be able to buy the game as a whole if you want to go that route. Well they are teaming up with T-Mobile to bring a ‘game rental’ service to Android.
We say ‘game rental’ because, even though it is in essence a game rental service, you only get to try the game out for 24 hours. However, this will only cost you $0.25 which is a nice price. So what games are we talking about? Ones that are on the Android Market. For the $0.25 fee you will be able to try out a game for 24hours that is on the Android Market before making the jump to buying the whole thing permanently. This is great for gamers who want to try a game out that doesn’t have a Lite/Trial version available to download off the market. Instead of just buying it outright and more than likely losing out (if you don’t like it) since you will more than likely surpass the new shortened refund period.
WildTangent and T-Mobile will have to come up with their own download service to bring this to light but ironically they are making it a point to be known that they are not trying to be another alternative app store. Instead the whole point of this is to bring better discoverability to games for Android. This pretty much means there will be some sort of submission process for developers who either 1) Don’t want to make a lite version of their game or 2) just want better exposure.
Both companies will also be trying to incorporate WildTangent’s currency of ‘Wildcoins’ which is used on the site to buy actual games as well as in-game items. To get Wildcoins, you have to purchase them using real money. With this rental system in place, Wildcoins will also be available for purchase using carrier billing.
While the whole concept is pretty interesting, and even though this isn’t an alternative app store according to both parties, whether this will take off or not remains to be seen. Eventually they want this service available on all major carriers. We already have a slew of alternative app stores to browse through, we suppose one more couldn’t hurt, right? Would you use this service? It would be nice if they brought the games they offer on their site to Android as well.
Official Website: WildTangent Games
Website Referenced: Phandroid
