And it will be more difficult for apps to dominate the upper reaches of its chart.
Nokia will soon allow developers to sell try-and-buy versions of their mobile games in its Ovi Store, offering free demo downloads from within which users can pay to unlock the full game.
That's according to Marco Argenti, Nokia's head of media and games, speaking at the Nokia World conference today.
“The first new business model that we're going to launch is try-and-buy,” he said. “It has already been tested in some of our preloaded games, and we're making that available in the store and allowing people to upgrade to the full version directly from the application.”
However, Argenti said Nokia sees that as just a first step towards offering new pricing models to developers.
“We're also thinking of implementing subscriptions, but more in terms of a subscription to specific applications, rather than a subscription to the store itself. It might be needed for content like news which is an ongoing service where you don't want to charge users up-front, but use a renewal model every month or week.”
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One thing that Argenti didn't mention was microtransactions, which has already been debuted by Apple in its iPhone 3.0 software.
That may frustrate social games publishers like Playfish and Zynga, who are keen to bring their virtual item models to mobile.
However, Argenti did talk about the way Nokia calculates the popularity rankings on Ovi Store, revealing that the chart is fully dynamic, calculated every time a user browses the store. Interestingly, 'popularity' isn't purely based on the amount of downloads for any given app.
“We do have a gravity element with time,” he said. “For apps to remain high, they need to have an increasing popularity. The same popularity doesn't guarantee the same position, because of that time element. It's to avoid the self-fulfilling proposition that if you're first, you remain first for life.”
It seems Nokia has been heeding the lessons of its N-Gage games service, where every game came as a try-and-buy demo, but where Tetris stuck like a limpet to the top of the N-Gage chart for most of the service's lifetime.
