On Mobile Games Forum almost 2 months ago, there were big talks on things like mobile game rental, pay per play, paying for games normally - what is the best method, and what will stay on the market as the leader? Will it hurt the revenues? What about refunding policies of so called AppStores, where Google announced in their Android Market a 24 hour return policy for games? Where is this all leading?

Now currently, I think 95% of the European mobile games market is paying for games regularly (other than the ton of illegal game downloads), and most markets have not even seen the daily rental model or pay-per-play model. Me, I don’t believe in rental of mobile games - it can work on the PC or console market, but can’t work on mobile phones. Why? Mobile phones are so small and so cheap methods of fun, that fragmenting a couple euros/dollars worth of prices is useless. Standard mobile games with the open market models will get cheaper, and larger hardcore games will get more expensive, but will be a niche market. I think any rental model basically hurts the mobile games market - sorry for the extreme opinion, but let’s open it up for discussion. Also, pay-per-play is very difficult - how do you do it in an environment with the operator billings mostly closed, with no universal technology out there for mobile billing? It would definitely be difficult.

Incoming with AppStores, there are many things that publishers have not yet taken in consideration, like the mentioned cheap prices.  What I think can happen though, is that methods like free lite download and pay-per-level could become very popular. Especially seeing the current downloads of lite products. Pay-per-play is hard to do, especially in the billing environment and taking in consideration the distribution channels and the fragmented operators/appstores on the market.

I believe the 2 most favorite methods will be still paying for a game, and then the pay-per-level method.

Now what about money back? This policy was introduced by Google, and honestly, I think it’s great on one side - as a user, on the other hand I think it could potentially be a killer - as a person from the mobile market. Will more of these methods be introduced? I hope Google will not go overboard and there won’t be users asking for return on every single game, and there will be some policy to it. It will be interesting to see it in a micro-market like the Android, what it will do. I am sure others will follow, if it proves to be succesful.

I guess the following quarters to come, we will see some changes. Will definately mean opportunites for the little and mid-size guys, who have been constantly pushed out to the edge of existence by mobile operators worldwide, but now have a chance to seriously strike back with new games, and it can potentially cut the bigger guys’ revenue.

Tags: Mobile Games, pay per level, pay per level mobile games, pay per play, pay per play mobile games, rental mobile games, return policy mobile games