The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation is planning to use taxpayer dollars to expand into the mobile gaming business to drive user time on its websites in a market already massively oversaturated with games.

A recent Request for Proposal posted on MERX shows the public broadcaster is seeking a contractor to build daily digital games for users of its Radio-Canada app in a bid to boost engagement and the amount of time users spend with CBC content.

That might raise eyebrows on its own. But when you consider the broader market landscape, critics are likely to wonder why taxpayer money is being spent to duplicate something that already exists in massive supply.

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Current mobile app store figures show an incredibly crowded gaming ecosystem:

• The Apple App Store offers about 2.1 million apps, of which over 211,000 are games — meaning tens of thousands of gaming options already available to users.
• The Google Play Store hosts roughly 2.19 million apps, including about 264,000 games on the Android side — another huge catalogue of titles that users can choose from.

Put together, that’s nearly half a million mobile games across the two largest app ecosystems, not counting apps on other platforms — and that count grows every day as new games are added globally.

So, while the CBC seeks to position itself as a mobile-gaming destination, millions of smartphones already carry thousands of gaming titles created by private developers completely independent of the public purse.

The broadcaster’s own RFP makes clear the goal is to “increase the frequency of product consumption and the time spent” on its app.