Mobile games making return to the high street
But is the idea boxing clever?
You used to be able to walk into Carphone Warehouse and buy mobile games. Really, you could. They were sold in boxes, like mini console games, except when you opened the box, you just got a slip of paper telling you what WAP address to download the game from.
They were a bit rubbish, to be honest. Not least because to the price of the game in the shop, you had to add data download charges. And because nobody walks into Carphone Warehouse browsing for mobile games.
So the idea died a death.
However, EA Mobile, Gameloft and Glu have been testing it again, on the quiet. We met French firm PNY at Mobile World Congress this week, and it was showing off a range of Micro SD memory cards, bundled with free mobile games from those three publishers.
The example in the photo above is a 1GB memory card which comes with Rayman Kart. PNY didn't talk pricing as such, but it told us a card with game(s) generally costs the same as a card without – the idea is a promotion to get people buying the memory cards.
But here's the weird thing: the games aren't actually preloaded on the memory card. Instead, on the back of the pack are instructions to download the game from a WAP site (in the pack we've got, it directs you to Gameloft's own WAP site).
Presumably, this is because it isn't possible to include every single port of a game on the memory card, given that they're not sold in handset-specific versions.
The packaging does make it clear that you're downloading the game onto your mobile, which has to be WAP-enabled, so it's not misleading. But it does mean users may still fall foul of data charges.
Anyway, it's interesting that the Big Three mobile players are investigating high-street retail again, although it seems the initiative comes from PNY rather than being a big push from the publishers themselves.
