Groupon-style shopping deals have become all the rage amongst digital deal hunters over the last few months, but few of these services have managed to offer deals on downloadable products. Daillly identified this gap in the market and quickly filled it, offering online deals exclusively for online products, services, and virtual currencies - and now they're branching into the world of iOS gaming.
Call this prediction, that everyone would want to create a "Groupon" for games, the one I meant to but was to busy to post last week. Silly me, I would have already been proven correct. Just 11 days into the New Year, Inhale Digitalhas announced that it has raised $1.1 million in funding and launched a Groupon for Games. Here's how it works: People sign up with their Facebook Connect account to receive daily game deals everyday up to 50 - 90% of the original price.
It was only a matter of time. Reportedly making billions of dollars a year and having spurned a rumored $6 billion acquisition offer from Google, GroupOn's group buying model is being copied and adopted to every market and every corner of the world. OpenFeint, among the most forward-thinking companies in the mobile game app space have announced the launch of Game Channel and a new feature called Fire Sale, in an attempt to bring Groupon mechanics to the Apple iTunes Store and Google's Android Marketplace.But, with a few twists since Groupon does not control the commerce portion of Apple's and Google's Store.