GameTanium offers Netflix-style subscription to Android games

By Rick Marshall July 18, 2011

The Android Market can take on a bit of a Wild West feel at times, with a vast frontier of titles and not a lot of policing to determine which offerings are really worth your hard-earned money. A new service by digital media company Exent is hoping to make that frontier a little friendlier — or at the very least, a little less expensive — with a Netflix-style subscription service for Android games.

Exent’s GameTanium kicked off its subscription-based gaming service this week, promising a library of 75 games currently available to users and more on the way. Access to GameTanium’s library of full-feature games will cost $4.99 per month, though there’s a free trial period available now to check out the service for a limited time.

The range of game offerings currently includes a few popular titles like Farm Frenzy and The Treasures of Montezuma 2, as well as some other sim-style games and a racer or two.

However, while the service appears to offer something new for Android gamers, there’s no telling how it will fare against existing options for low-cost gaming, such as the Amazon Appstore, which occasionally offers some of the same full-feature games at no cost as part of its “Free App Of The Day” campaign. There’s also the question of whether users will be able to find GameTanium on their own, as the service won’t be made available in the Android Market (since it’s technically a competing marketplace for apps).

Android users who want to give GameTanium a try will need to manually enable the installation of non-Market apps on their mobile devices, but you can get a peek at the selection of games over at GameTanium’s official website before you decide to install anything.

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