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In October, O2 customers in Ireland will have access to a range of video games over their phones, including old favourites like Asteroids, Pong and Breakout.
MmO2, O2 Ireland's parent company, said on Wednesday that it planned to launch the wide range of commercial Java games next month for pre-paid and post-paid users in the UK. The games, which will be in colour and will include sound, will be available for download. During September in the UK, the company is waiving the standard STG1.50 fee for each game and will charge users only the STG0.30 download fee.
By October, the O2 Games Arcade will available to O2 customers in Ireland, Germany and the Netherlands as well.
A few Atari classics, including Asteroids, Pong and Breakout, will be among the first games to be launched on the service. Other new O2 Arcade games will include titles such as Marslander, Men in Black II, Denkiblocks, Oilrig, Racing Fever, Forbidden Jungle, Pinball -- The Castle, Turtles, Towers, and Popstar.
There is a catch, however; users will need a Java-enabled mobile to play the games and for now O2 is promoting the Nokia 3410 and the Siemens M50 for interested customers. A spokesperson for the company said that more O2-approved Java-enabled devices would hit the market before Christmas.
After the free period ends at the start of October, O2 users will pay for the games on an "event basis" similar to ringtones. In the UK, the games will cost STG1.50, plus the download charge of STG0.30. In Ireland, Germany and the Netherlands, games will cost EUR2.50, plus a EUR0.50 download charge. With each download, users will be able to play as frequently as they like for 30 days, after which they will have to download the game again in order to keep playing.
"We have selected games that are ideally suited to mobile - that look good on screen and take only minutes to download," commented Tim Raby, head of games for O2. "To ensure variety, we will be adding around three games per month to our portfolio to ensure that our gamers never get bored."
As with virtually all emerging mobile applications, the games are a bid by O2 to eke out more data revenues from customers. And O2 points to statistics from Forrester Research which suggest that the company will be successful in doing so. According to Forrester's research, in three years, 45 percent of mobile subscribers in Europe will regularly pay to play games on their phones.
O2 went on to point to other research which says that the global spending on mobile games will total EUR4.4 billion by 2006 and O2's own research says 65 percent of its users, aged 16-19, expressed a "strong interest" in downloading games to their mobiles.
"This is another example of how compelling devices and applications are coming together to make mobile data a reality today," commented Kent Thexton, chief marketing and data officer of mmO2. "We believe that the O2 Games Arcade and multimedia messaging (MMS), which we will launch shortly, are highly desirable mobile data applications that our customers will embrace."
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