Skich Aims to Be the 'Steam for Mobile' With New App Store

A mobile gaming startup, Skich, has launched an alternative app store on iOS in the European Union and globally on Android, aiming to solve long-standing issues of game discovery and social fragmentation in the market. The company is positioning its platform as a central hub for players, drawing comparisons to the role Steam serves for the PC gaming community.

The Skich platform addresses the challenge of navigating oversaturated mobile marketplaces. It employs an AI-powered recommendation engine and a swipe-based interface, similar to dating apps, allowing users to quickly sort through a curated feed of games. 

The system utilizes a detailed categorization of over 240 specific genres, which the company states is significantly more than what is offered on traditional app stores. In addition to discovery, the platform integrates social features that enable users to create a unified gamer profile, build friend lists, and create user-curated game lists.

'Steam for mobile' experience

The company's launch on iOS in Europe is a direct result of the EU's Digital Markets Act (DMA), which now requires Apple to permit third-party app stores on its platform. This regulatory shift, along with landmark legal rulings from cases like Epic Games vs. Google in the US, has created the market opportunity for such alternatives.

"We launched Skich Store to solve one of the biggest problems in mobile gaming: discoverability,” Skich CEO and co-founder Sergey Budkovski said in a statement to PocketGamer.biz. He emphasized that the platform is designed to be purely player-focused and will not feature paid advertisements or pay-to-rank systems. "Only the player decides what deserves recognition and what doesn’t," Budkovski stated.

For game developers, Skich offers a different value proposition. The platform operates on a 15% commission on transactions, a rate lower than the 30% standard charged by major app stores. 

Budkovski noted that this model is intended to attract creators, particularly those developing for "midcore and hardcore genres" who may be underserved by current discovery algorithms.

The venture is supported by a reported base of over 400,000 users from its previous iteration as a discovery app. While it faces the considerable task of competing with other big players like Google Play and Apple's App Store, its strategy is to focus on addressing specific user and developer pain points that have persisted in the multi-billion-dollar mobile gaming industry.

As Budkovski puts it, the company that will succeed is "the store that best understands player needs and delivers unique solutions." For the millions of mobile gamers tired of endless scrolling, that solution can't come soon enough.