October 5th, 2008 by Arjan Olsder Posted in Distribution | 2 Comments »
Following the news that T-Mobile would
open its own version of the App Store, more details are surfacing.
One of the most remarkable is that developers will pay for user
generated data traffic.
The T-Mobile App Store is meant to run
next to Apple’s. This means it will not be another route to sell
iPhone games. The expectations are that the channel will have a
strong focus on T-Mobile’s own devices (Windows Mobile in the
high-end segment).
Every application will be allowed to
spend 15MB a month. As soon as a consumer generates more traffic, the
developer has to pay between $ 2 and $ 4,50. This means that a
popular application can cannibalize all revenues.
very funny. but thats how operators think. If they can. Open the mobile games market to everyone not only to some few ones, offer a fair model not 10-25% to publishers that need to work with strange distributors and we will all see sales are going up. But what are they doing? They limit the publisher partners to 2 (EA and Gameloft) and push every other to the loved aggregators that partly dont pay or pay their bills first (Telcogames, Mocondi, etc.). Thats not a business!
If the operators dont realize that also big companies like Vivendi say that this business is sick why are they still doing the same shit again and again?
Paying for traffic of consumer plus having own traffic on the servers. Should we also pay operators the coffee, dinner, tabledance, trips to nice hotels around the world of course including the flight, pc or consoles, pc or console games, the deck placement, the banners on the portals/marketing. Shit we are already doing that.
How sick is this? When are the operators realizing that they are just the current pipe nothing else than a shop but without the consumers.
They destroy the own business and dont realize it.
Oh dear, I think this a very silly thing indeed to do to developers and publishers of all sizes and is a big turn off if true.