You can now buy Shockwave videogames for your J2ME-running cellphone (including those that use Sprint/ATT or Cingular, but not T-Mobile for some reason), following an announcement that neatly collapses two trends I've been following into one story.
The first is Navio, a company I wrote about earlier which wants to enable digital storefronts where consumers can buy "rights-based content." This constitutes songs, videos, games, etc. that are tailored to specific devices, and is stored in a digital locker from which they can be reinstalled on new devices. Basically, consumers would buy the right to a piece of content, and would be able to access it regardless of which platform they happen to be using at the time.
The second trend is the annoying tendency of cellphone carriers to lock down phones, limiting what their owners can do with them.
Yesterday, Navio told me that Shockwave is now using Navio's DRM and format/device matching technology to offer about 50 cellphone videogames on Shockwave.com (currently in beta).
One Navio-enabled aspect of the service is visible on the page: the drop-down menu that lets you select your phone in order to find properly formatted games. But the other promising aspect of Navio – the digital locker holding all of your "rights-based content" – is nowhere to be found.
This is because the cellphone service carriers won't permit the games to be redeployed, should a customer upgrade to a new (compatible) phone. I think their approach is shortsighted, because people won't buy as much stuff if they know they'll lose it every time they switch phones.
This especially holds true for music, which generally has a longer shelf life and easier compatibility than videogames (although I admit, there are plenty of pop songs out there with less staying power than Tetris). No one would have upgraded to CD if they knew the CDs would vanish every time they bought a new CD player, but that's what cell carriers seem to be expecting of their customers. Hopefully, as the mobile market matures, this will change.
Speaking of markets maturing, Navio told me that it will start offering songs in Apple's FairPlay-secured format later on this quarter (stay tuned).
