Play Avenue app curates Google Play games, tells you what’s actually worth looking at

One of the problems I have with the current Google Play store is that it has way too many apps. Even though they’re neatly separated by category, I still think it’s an information overload at times. And how would you know if an app’s reviews are from real users or friends, family, or bots from the creators?

The Play Avenue app from Hong Kong-based company Cheerclan Limited solves that problem. Touted as a “new, simple, and fun” way of discovering new games, Play Avenue is a neat little app that features one worthwhile game a day.

(See: Protect Teddy review: play this game, you won’t regret it)

“We […] realized there actually are quite a number of reasonably well-developed, creative, and fun games on the app stores, but [that] just don’t seem to catch the eyes of a hopefully larger crowd,” says 25-year-old Cheerclan co-founder, Shu Kit Tse. Cheerclan is part of the Hong Kong Science Park’s Incu-App program until July this year.

Tse says he had grown up playing video games, and the idea for Play Avenue came about one day when he was speaking to his 24-year-old partner, Tony Wong, about what to work on.

“I instinctively blurted out something that went, ‘you know, I think mobile games suck’,” he says, “I felt that a lot of mobile games aren’t that great. We eventually figured making an app like Play Avenue might be useful to people who want to play mobile games that are actually fun, no matter how well-marketed the games are.”

Play Avenue is manually curated, so I ask Tse what the curation process is like.

He says that a game first has to be fun and relatively original for them to feature it. Trailers and screenshots also help, though the team passes on a game if there are too many bad user reviews in spite of good looking screenshots.

(See: Gun Strike 2 review: fun with bullets and bobble-heads)

Tse also adds that older games released between 2010 to 2012 also stand a chance of getting featured if they are unique enough. The team takes about three to four hours per day per game for Play Avenue’s curation.

Still, an app only ever has as much longevity as its company. Tse says that Cheerclan has, “realistically speaking”, no plans yet for monetization. However he feels that having ads in the app wouldn’t be pleasant for users.

“We also plan on making new apps to expand our portfolio as a company and see where that leads us,” he said.