Qualcomm is preparing to announce GameCommand, it’s largest consumer-oriented announcement at CES. The app will rival NVIDIA’s Tegra Zone application on the Android Market.
Tegra Zone and GameCommand are curated stores-within-a-store. The apps allow for gamers to pick games that are optimized for the device that they own, and take advantage of the graphical power of their specific devices. While Android operates on open standards such as OpenGL, but games must often fall to a low common denominator. With millions of Android devices lacking graphical power, games must often rely on the CPU to deliver more interactivity, and less 3D.
It’s not clear how successful Tegra Zone, which curates games for NVIDIA’s Tegra 2 and upcoming Tegra 3 processors has been. NVIDIA has not stated how many games have been downloaded or sold through it. Mostly, because they don’t know for certain; the game passes links to the Android Market. Android Market may be aware of if a gamer discovers a game through TegraZone, but Google certainly isn’t talking numbers there either. GameCommand is widely expected to operate within the Android Market, much like Tegra Zone.
One thing that remains in question, is how many Qualcomm devices GameCommand will curate for. It is expected that the game gallery will curate games for Qualcomm’s Snapdragon’s Adreno GPU. This wouldn’t be the first gallery targeting Adreno, the Sony Ericsson Xperia PLAY is powered by Adreno, and features its own store-within-a-store for PlayStation-certified games.
