Hooked Media leans on personalization to make its Android game discovery shine

The game discovery problem -- while not solved -- has plenty of competitors that are either going to do it or die trying. Hooked Media, which has a profitable web gaming platform with 11 million monthly active users, is now trying to get in on this potential market too. It recently launched a personalized game recommendations app called Hooked that has attracted between 50 and 100,000 installs organically on Android Market. Basically when you install it, it scans through your existing portfolio of games and asks you to quickly review them with a like or dislike. It can also track a person's gameplay statistics to see how long they've played particular titles. From that, it recommends similar games a person might like. While chief executive Prita Uppal didn't give too many details on how Hooked is able to find similar titles, it sounds like the company scrapes the Android store and mixes it with historical data from its web-based platform. For every app, Android Market shows apps that consumers have also looked at or installed. But there's no open API to access that data. "It's Pandora-meets-Netflix for games," Uppal said. "We try to understand how long people play games and which ones they're playing the most. We crawl the market to find app-to-app similarities. We also take into account the social graph, the player's demographic and their interests." Uppal was coy on how the Android product will monetize except to say that the company will have several announcements with partners over the next few weeks. It will stay free to users and free to developers and she hinted it won't rely so heavily on a model like paid or sponsored recommendations. The company recently partnered with Best Buy and VentureBeat in a game developer contest that will choose a winner through Hooked's metrics and then through a panel of judges including Google's Bradley Horowitz, who oversees Google+. Hooked started out with a web-based gaming network that supports itself through advertising and splits revenue with developers at a 60-40 rate. It has raised two venture rounds, with an initial $1.5 million in 2008 from U.S. Venture Partners, and then a follow-on of $3 million in 2009 led by Altos Ventures. The San Francisco-based company has 19 employees including a sales team in New York. It's competing against a very deep field. Japan's DeNA has been pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into a new global mobile gaming platform called Mobage while GREE plans to re-launch a mobile gaming network in the first half of this year. There are also venture-backed networks like Beijing's PapayaMobile and San Francisco's Heyzap that are trying to solve app discovery. There are also a host of standalone apps like Appsfire, Explor and Chomp. Plus, there's always the risk that Google could always launch its own version of Game Center.

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Hooked Media leans on personalization to make its Android game discovery shine

Kim-Mai Cutler

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