Who’s in charge of distributing mobile games?
John Carmack is making mobile phone games these days. His current one is an RPG called Orcs and Elves. It looks pretty cool:
so I figured I’d give it a go. It’s a mobile phone game so I thought I should be able to get it pretty quickly, how wrong I was. I couldn’t buy it directly off ID, it’s being published by EA Mobile. No problem I go to their site, there it is for $2.99, I click Buy Now. I’m then told I need to select my mobile provider, but it only lists American ones. I’m on the American site, so I switch the to UK one. Orcs and Elves is nowhere to be found, at least on the front page. I use their game finder, which requires me to select my provider. I select Vodafone, it brings me to a page that tells me I need to go to the Vodafone website on the web or on my phone. They can’t even tell me which EA games are available through Vodafone.
I go to the Vodafone games site. I can’t see Orcs and Elves, and they force me to find games by browsing by phone model and type of game. I try the search, it comes up with nothing. I’m not sure if it searches the games, so I try searching for their current top game, FIFA 2006. There’s one result and it directs me to this page (a 404 for those too lazy to click). Clearly their search is broken so I end up browsing, thankfully there’s an EA category, because the Action/Adventure has 11 pages to browse through.
End result? They don’t have it. They do have Doom RPG, ID’s first attempt at a mobile game, which has good reviews, but I’m not that interested in a turn based version of Doom. Even if I was it costs £5.00, three times more than I could buy the newer game if I was in America! Why is getting a hold of this game so difficult? I don’t buy it in a shop, I don’t get a CD, I get it off the Internet, and with a phone connected to the Internet I should be able to get it virtually anywhere. But instead I’m forced to wait for my mobile provider to get it, then get charged a huge markup because I’m in the UK and can only get it through them.
I hope this isn’t a sign of how the mobile Internet is going to work for all media.
