A while back, Samsung announced a developer initiative called Made With Samsung that’s catered to helping developers promote their app on Samsung’s device ecosystem. The initiative is part of a push to try to compete with the Apple App Store and Google’s Play Store, who currently dominate the market. Although Samsung’s own Galaxy Apps store is on all of their Android devices, it doesn’t see nearly as much use as the Play Store. With developers like The Weather Channel and CNN on board, however, it’s quite hard to find many bad things to say about the program, especially this early on. At the GamesBeat 2016 conference, Samsung’s Vice President of Emerging Platforms, Mihai Pohontu, announced that the Made With Samsung initiative would become available to indie game developers.
The initiative provides developers with tools to help an app in development, help with polishing the app and help with publishing and promoting it, even on other platforms. While Samsung does want exclusivity in some measure with apps and games put through the program, Pohontu did state that Samsung is more than willing to continue offering help to developers after the exclusivity period ends. He went on to point out that Samsung should be able to get most developers at least 40,000 installations in a given month and, in some cases, may also pack-in their app on new devices in some markets.
One sweet spot that Pohontu touched on was that developers looking to run with the new wave of VR gaming that’s been picking up steam lately can take advantage of Samsung’s early and focused efforts in the space, leveraging the popularity and availability of Samsung’s Gear VR platform to push their titles. Arguably the most popular mobile VR solution at the moment, top billing on Gear VR may be more than enough to sway some developers who may have otherwise been on the fence. While Samsung does not plan to offer any cash benefits to developers, they are confident that their full-service development and publishing suite should make up for that. While they’re only a bit player in mobile gaming at the moment, Samsung seems to be betting big on this initiative and the early bird and exclusive games it could bring them to get a leg up on the competition.