Mobile games

[ysnnim]

Ladies and Gents - just a quick question.

We developed an application some time ago that enables payments to be made from your mobile phone without the 'home' network taking a significant % of the transaction. It is a simple (and very discrete) solution (as all the best ones are!) and we have covered it in as much IPR as we can...

It seems to me that in the forseeable future there will be an ever increasing volume of applications (Games and suchlike) written for handsets (in Java/similar) that are faced with the problem of how to get the consumer to pay for the game/service they are downloading. The developer can either approach the GSM operator and get a right royal shafting...or adopt an independent payment method (like ours).

The question is....are there developers (who are writing games/apps for mobile) within the PH fraternity that are faced with this issue, and if so, how are they looking to get round the problem?

Cheers

David

[darrent]

This is what I do for a living so I'll jot down my thoughts for you. The problem you have in trying to cut out the mobile networks is obviously they won't like it. That then leads on to the next problem of how do you get your application on the handset to enable payment via your method??? Without the help of the operator it's actually very difficult to get a peice of software on the handset without a substantial marketing campaign beacause you have to drive the consumer to want it. Obviously the networks have many different ways of putting a new peice of software on your handset and more often than not the handset vendor (e.g. Nokia) will do this at source before it hits retail.

[rpguk]

I'm currently starting a new company which may offer a subscription service (nothing to do with games mind) which is paid for by reverse billing SMS and are seeing ratecards offering at most £3ish on a £5 text (this is using a shared keyword)

Its a truely poor amount but the ability to take payment in such a fashion means it may be worth it (still have to run some numbers to see)

If you can offer a system which gives a better revenue share I'd be very interested to hear.

Does it bill to the mobile or is it another system, and will it work on all phones (like reverse billing) or does it rely on software being installed?

If its a good system your on to a winner though, good luck wrestling the money from the networks!

>> Edited by rpguk on Friday 31st March 11:36

[john_p]

I am involved in the mobile content area too and the problem we find is that it's easy to advertise text-to-shortcode or call-IVR-number payment services, and that the minute you complicate the process it all falls apart and you have a customer services nightmare.

I don't dispute there is a need for a better payment method out there, but the networks have everyone over a barrel (almost as much as they do with the GPRS/3G download charges)

Can you say roughly how your payment system works?