Fishlabs to distribute games via e-mail

High data rates force mobile studio’s hand.

Mobile game developer Fishlabs has started delivering its titles to users via e-mail attachments, as a response to the high cost of over-the-air data transferral.

At this year’s GDC Mobile experts discussed how data rates were one of the factors that slowed growth in the mobile gaming sector in 2007, especially as the rates are much higher for pre-paid users – a large number of which are the young gamers that mobile developers are targeting.

"Because our high quality 3D Java games have sophisticated graphics and offer several hours of gameplay, they can be up to a megabyte in size, which is relatively large,” said Michael Schade, Fishlabs CEO and co-founder.

“So as of now we are offering hassle and cost free delivery of our mobile games as e-mail attachments. The mobile game can then be transferred quite simply from the PC to the mobile phone via data cable or Bluetooth connection. This means that our customers not only save on data transfer costs, they also have a backup copy if the game is accidentally deleted or the mobile phone software is updated."