MGF 2008: The price of mobile games

The first panel session at today's Mobile Games Forum focused on billing, which sounds boring. But it's not. Well, maybe a little. But it's an important issue, covering the price of mobile games, and how to tempt more people to download them, without leaving publishers out of pocket.

On the face of it, £5 is a fair price for a mobile game, but the problem – particularly in the UK – is that there's a lot of people on pay-as-you-go contracts who often won't have much more than a fiver on their credit. And they need that for texts and calls. Apparently the average amount of credit is £3.10.

Would dropping the price help?

Possibly, but publishers aren't keen on that as a catch-all solution – because it would reduce their revenues at a time when the costs of developing games are only increasing – but also because it might create a perception of mobile games as cheap and disposable.

Instead, operators are looking towards other pricing models, such as renting games for 50p a day, or subscriptions which spread the cost over a few months, or 'product cycling' where a game is sold at £5 when it first comes out, then dropped to £3 later, then offered as a rental and so on.

These aren't new ideas. Subscriptions are already popular in the US, while the product cycling model has been done by 3 in the UK for some time. When it launches, Nokia's new N-Gage service will offer a choice of ways to pay for each game.

In the room at MGF, there are mixed views on whether subscriptions will work here in Europe.

I have two reservations about this though. First, if you want to have five or six games available to play on your phone at any one time, you'll end up paying five or six separate subscriptions – even at a couple of quid a pop, that'll mount up.

There's also the issue of people forgetting they're subscribed to a game, and ending up paying, say, £10 for Tetris over five months, simply because they're a bit absent-minded. Subscriptions seem more sensible when you're getting something beyond the basic solo game: for example new levels or episodic content every month, or an ongoing multiplayer community.

Sorry, this has been mainly me giving my thoughts, instead of reporting on what the panel of experts are saying.

Everyone seems clear that the flat 'pay £5 for a game' model is working for some gamers – the 4.8 per cent of mobile users who downloaded a game in November here in the UK - but that other methods need to be tried to increase the number of people buying mobile games.

Alex Tan from Gameloft is a big fan of the product cycling idea.

"The thing we've been facing with some operators is a lack of flexibility in getting access to lower price points in a quick way," he says. "Some have a lead time of 6-8 weeks to get lower price points. So if you see after a month that your game isn't selling well, and you want to drop the price to shift it, you have to wait 4-6 weeks. And some operators are limited in the number of games they're allowed to drop the price of every month."

Tan also says bundled games and buy-one-get-one-free (BOGOF) deals could also have a big impact. Of course, as publishers launch their own WAP and websites selling games, they have complete freedom there to offer these deals, and flexible pricing.

I'm guessing the dilemma for them is if they sell their games cheaper on their own sites, the operators might not be too happy.

I asked about this, and O2's Antony Douglas and Orange's Neil Holroyd both said they don't see this as a threat right now, because the majority of mobile gamers are buying from the operator portals rather than seeking out publisher's own sites.