GameFly's made some interesting moves in the last few months. They jumped into the digital distribution space last year, offering games for streaming in addition to their physical mail rentals. While that moved GameFly's overall offering closer to that of Steam, they still relied on publishers to supply their pipelines with games. That's going to change a bit, at least on the smartphone side.
The company has announced today that it will be funding and publishing mobile games on both iOS and Android. If you're an independent developer who's working on a game, then you might want to take note that GameFly's taking submissions right now and you can e-mail gamedev@gamefly.com. The plan is to launch the GameFly GameStore this holiday season. As for iOS, they've already got an app that points users at good deals but GameFly-funded games will show up on Apple's App Store with GameFly listed as publisher.
This shift represents an interesting alternative to Kickstarter crowd-funding, as it makes both funding and distribution available in one deal. It'll be interesting to see the kinds of games that come through GameFly's new initiative. Here's hoping it's not all Angry Birds clones.