May 22nd, 2008 by Arjan Olsder Posted in Analysis & Editorial | No Comments »
At this moment, various sources like Engadget and Pocket Gamer discuss the physical limits of the N-Gage service. Gamers seem to be pissed about the fact that they need to re-purchase their mobile games when switching devices.
So for the first time in many, many years, the discussion about transferring games to new handsets is lit up once again. This time, the discussion is triggered by Nokia’s N-Gage service as consumers complaint that they have to re-purchase games when switching to a new N-Gage device.
These complaint are somewhat surprising as most of those consumers have probably purchased games for their older devices a before and probably noticed that those games weren’t transferable. In de world of mobile gaming, there are hardly (if) any channels that offer to transfer your mobile game to a new device. This while OMA does provide that possibility. In most cases, the problem is purely in device support. Developers can’t develop a game that runs on any device imaginable, and be expected to continually work on porting their older titles. The same thing goes for the N-Gage service. Even if Nokia would allow N-Gage games to be transferred to new N-Gage devices, wouldn’t the next complaint come from a consumer that switched from a Nokia N95 to a SonyEricsson W910!?
