It might be flagged up heavily as a mix of rumour and speculation, but Stuart Dredge's column over on Pocket Gamer makes a certain amount of sense. In it he puts forward the idea that Nokia will launch a 'Comes With Games' service, similar to 'Comes With Music' that we know is coming. The rumor was repeated by many at the recent Leipzig Game Developers Conference, with one major label allegedly signed up.

Assuming that somewhere in Finland this actually is being discussed seriously, this has the potential to impart a shift on the mobile games market that would be comparable to the music store market. But it's going to be a much harder market to crack.

The first thing is that unlike the music industry, it's going to be much harder to get a sense of having 'every' game available, so this is likely to be a smaller subset of games, perhaps just from a number of recognisable names such as EA, Eidos, THQ or Gameloft. Actually grab those four and you'd be doing pretty well. The obvious area for Comes with Games would be the N-Gage platform, and it would certainly benefit from the boost of players and the market interest.

My worry is that if it was introduced to that polatform 9which still has a relativly small user base) is that it would be perceived as 'we're loosing so we have to give the games away;' precisly the PR that you don't want.

I agree with Dredge here - applying this principle to Nokia's SNAP service, which is predominantly Java games with online multi player elements. being able to provide players with all these games under an 'all you can eat' plan would be very attractive, especially if you pair it up with a gaming/online orientated S40 device.

The big question is what the carriers would do - providing a kickback in terms of online bandwidth isn't going to be a long term financial plan, and you have to assume that a lot of the work of promoting and downloading the games would be based on a Nokia server, on a built in Nokia client, which will take traffic away from the carrier. Don't forget though, that this is the case with the N-Gage, and thanks to the over the air billing there is something in it for the carriers.

And if Nokia are focussing on their own SNAP system then sourcing games from both themeselves and third parties may not be an insurmountable barrier as well.

The plan has merit, and certainly deserves to be seriously considered. Whether Nokia are actually looking to put this out remains to be seen, but it would make sense for marketing, it would provide more reasons to buy Nokia handsets (and keep buying them, if the (yearly?) subscription is only available with a new phone), it would keep Nokia in an innovative game and it would continue Nokia along the path of being a web services and software company that happen to make phones.

What do you think?