Providers have already tried a few approaches aimed at breaking into the gaming industry, many of which have not been successful. One approach is for carriers to run a game download service themselves, which they then implement on their supported devices. Although not done by a provider, a relevant example of this was Nokia’s N-gage project, which began as a handset that was built for gaming but then was re-released later as an OTA download service. Unfortunately, the physical handset sold poorly because of its unattractive form factor, bad user interface and lack of content. Although the more recently released download service has made the interface much more user-friendly, there still remain problems regarding handset compatibility and availability of content. These issues highlight the difficulty of non-gaming companies to run a gaming service by themselves, since they are not familiar with the content strategies involved in gaming and often find themselves competing with much more experienced rivals.

For telecom carriers, they are at an immense disadvantage if they choose to operate a gaming portal for several reasons. First, they do not have the experience or the brand name to build a standalone device on which to implement such a portal. For mobile phones, they could use the handsets that they sell, but so far, portals run by carriers have been characterized by poor interfaces, lack of compelling content and an overall bad user experience. Second, carriers do not generally have any relationships with gaming publishers and are not well versed in content sourcing strategies for the gaming industry. Therefore, it would be expensive and time-consuming for them to build up a collection of content for their portal. Even for mobile games, in which carriers historically dominated, more and more users are going off-deck for their gaming content, with 20% of mobile gamers getting their content from third party sources[1] in 2008, which is up from 10% in 2005[2]. Lastly, it is already far too late for carriers to think about starting their own digital distribution portals. All the major console makers (Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony) have already created their own gaming aggregation portals for their consoles and online players such as Steam and Direct2Drive have more or less cornered the market on digital distribution of PC games in most developed countries. At this point, a telecom operated gaming portal for anything but mobile gaming would seem unnecessarily redundant and out of place unless it was done in a developing country where existing digital distribution players have not entered yet. One way carriers could have some kind of content portal is if it involved non-gaming content such as local news, weather and directories. However, it would be very easy for the console-makers to provide such a service and even if they did not, it would be very unlikely for carriers to generate much revenue from operating such a portal.