AAN recently heard reports that some Nokia customer service staff were claiming game transfers from one phone to another were no longer possible. We've checked with Nokia about this and they assure us that transfers ARE still possible, anyone who tells you otherwise is mistaken. If you've had problems getting Nokia's customer services to do a transfer, go to the official N-Gage Game Activation Support Forum and send a private message to one of the moderators explaining your problem (the mods' names are marked in red).
Read on in the full article.
One of our regulars was told by Nokia customer service that the transfer tool had been removed, but according to people higher up at Nokia this simply isn't true.
If you run into this sort of problem do contact the forum mods at the link in the story, they should be able to help you out.
Cheers for the heads up. Had a few posts about this over on N95users. I will link to your article.!
Thanks for the link Micky. 😊
A kind of YES and NO to this one actually. Regardless of what customer services say it is evident that you can transfer your games however you can only do this ONCE.
I was told flat by customer services that it wasnt possible to do, however upon advice from the AAS forums I contacted a mod at oven on the official N-Gage forum who said that I could only transfer some of my games but the very first 3 games I bought could not as I had already transfered them once before. I dont remember any of the press releases saying you could only change devices once.
As a hopeless geek I change my phone quite regularly. I was on a N95 8GB when N-Gage went fully live and bought a couple of games. I then moved to an N82, transfered my 3 games from the N95 to the N82 and bought 3 more. I then moved to an N96 and went to transfer all 6 games only to be told I couldnt.
What N-Gage is doing is nothing new. Loads of software is linked to IMEI. The thing is instead of encouraging more legitimate sales, my own experience is that I have gone from a habitual purchaser of third party software now I by very, very little because I just can see the point when I know I will change my phone every few months.
Personally, like DRM, I think the practice of linking software to IMEI's is very shortsighted and often is actually counter productive in that people that want to rip the software off for free always end up finding a way, but honest customers like myself get to the stage where they cant see the point of buying software they know they wont be able to use in the future.
Still I guess thats a whole different story ...
I contacted a mod at oven on the official N-Gage forum who said that I could only transfer some of my games but the very first 3 games I bought could not as I had already transfered them once before. I
PaulyLaw, thanks for that. Hmm... veeery very interesting.
As N-Gage hasn't been running too long (since April as a download, since October as embedded) not many people have had the chance to switch phones more than once so this wouldn't be noticed, and it may be that they were banking on people not noticing.
However, like you say some people do change phones more than once a year, and eventually all of us will move onto a third phone with N-Gage compatibility, so this is definitely a serious problem if confirmed. I've certainly only had games on two phones (an N81 and N95) so the transfer issue just wasn't an issue for me, but if I then upgrade again I don't want to rebuy my collection, yet that's what it sounds like they're asking me to do.
We'll ask Nokia for a public statement on this, and if they confirm it (which I assume they will if a mod told you this) we'll do a story about it once again. It seems they haven't quite lived up to their commitment...
As for the arguments over this kind of ultra-restrictive DRM, believe me we'll be running through them again in any news feature we do about this topic. Personally I don't think it's the IMEI-locking that's a problem in itself, it's the restrictions in transferring from one IMEI to another. A lot of phone games are locked to IMEI, but good publishers will let you transfer to a new IMEI as often as you want by contacting them. Nokia ought to be following their example.
As we said in our infamous article back in the Spring, restricting games to just one (or two!) phones punishes both N-Gage fans and Nokia fans the most, because these are precisely the people who are most likely to be forced to re-buy games. It also destroys any sense of brand loyalty, and erodes the number of people likely to take part in online games so it destroys community spirit too.