Pricing Mobile Content

Via moco.news, I came across this report of a talk which Charles Dunstone, CEO & Founder of Carphone Warehouse made at the recent 3GSM World Congress. The story is primarily about how sales of the Nokia 7600 3G phone have out-done their expectiations, but towards the end, Dunstone starts talking about the pricing of mobile content:

Speaking about channels such as CNN trying to charge for their news, he said: “Everyone is too greedy. News is too freely available for people to think they can charge €5 per month [for it].”

Yep, I totally agree with that. I suppose some people might pay for a 10-second video clip associated with a news story, but that should be charged at €0.10 or so. The actual stories themselves should be free, because they are free everywhere else.

Dunstone goes on:

He added ringtones and games shouldn’t be priced above €0.99 and MMS photo messages not more than twice that of SMS.

This is the bit I disagree with, specifically about pricing games. Games for mobile devices should not be priced at the same level as ringtones. Why? Infinitely more work goes into producing a mobile game than producing a ringtone, which can largely be done automagically. On the other hand, a game is created from scratch with only some reference artwork being re-used if it is an edition of a game which already appeared on another games platform, or is based on a cartoon or movie or whatever.

The promise of J2ME’s write once, run anywhere may be realised with MIDP3.0 (I just made that up, in case you’re wondering) but for now, developers need to cope with a huge range of different handsets, meaning KVM bugs, memory limitations, screen sizes, file sizes, OEM-specific APIs, all of which differ from manufacturer to manufacturer, handset to handset, and even between different firmware revisions of the same handset.

However, even beyond that, games should still be more expensive than ringtones. Consumers are used to this distinction already, based on the situation in the physical world, where (generally speaking) games are around 3 times as expensive as a CD. Further, ringtones are highly disposable, whereas the well-designed games are not. In fact, I can virtually guarantee that you’ll get more enjoyment from even a not-so-great game than you will from a ringtone.

And why on earth should the operators be setting the prices? Isn’t it the job of of the game publisher to set the price according to what their research tells them?

It seems to me that a lot of the current thinking in the mobile content industry is a bit bass-ackwards…