There was a huge to-do several months ago, when we all realized that Nokia’s current N-Gage policy doesn’t allow you to transfer a game license from one handset to the next. The debacle was covered across the internet, with everyone from blogs to major news outlets picking up and commenting on the story. Nokia made a statement that essentially said, ‘Thanks for letting us know, we’re working on it,’ and then we never heard anything else again.
AllAboutNgage has decided to check into things again, and have discovered that while you can, now, transfer your licenses, it only works once, according to Nokia. You can call in to have your license transferred from the original phone to a 2nd one, but there is no plan in place to allow multiple handset transfers, sadly. Also, the policy doesn’t account for phones that are stolen, where the owner has no control over having to get a replacement.
Nokia has stated before that a more robust plan is in the works, where gamers will have the ability to transfer their license quickly and easily, by simply changing the IMEI tied to their gamer ID. However, there have not been any details released as to when we might expect this to be announced, or more importantly, available.
With the N-Gage application only getting a single, rather small incremental update since it was officially released, and games trickling out at roughly one per month, I’m really rather concerned for N-Gage’s future. I would have hoped Nokia learned more from its first foray into N-Gage territory, the current policy is even more restrictive than the original system, where you could as least swap the memory card containing the game into any phone.
I personally have licenses for 4 games, spread across 4 different phones. I’m planning on getting an N85 NAM soon, though, so I’m hesitant to go through the hassle of transferring the licenses to my N95-3, only to transfer them again a few weeks (hopefully) later.
Have you successfully transferred your N-Gage game licenses to a new phone? How easy/hard was it?
