A new Mexican MVNO called Easter Egg has been launched to target the country’s extensive gamer community, according to a report. Like most recently launched MVNOs in Mexico, Easter Egg uses Red Compartida, the wholesale 4.5G shared network of the Altan Redes consortium.
Easter Egg’s inaugural offer includes promotional “coins” that can be spent on a number of benefits. The plans available at launch include High Score 30, with 30 GB of data (plus an additional 9 GB gift), 1,500 voice minutes, 1,000 SMS and 300 Easter Coins for MXN 450 (US $22.88) a month. The two other plans are High Score 8, with 8 GB of data, 1,500 minutes of calls, 1,000 SMS and 150 Easter Coins for MXN 250 (US $12.71) a month and High Score 5 with 5 GB of data, 1,500 minutes of calls, 1,000 SMS and 70 Easter Coins for MXN 150 (US $7.63) a month. Customers who sign up for the High Score 30 package during the first month will receive a free Crunchyroll subscription; further benefits will be announced later.
Tarifica’s Take
MVNOs typically find their strength in targeted marketing, slicing the market fairly thinly in search of niche demographics to which they can offer specialized services. While many if not most of these demographics are budget-oriented, and as the MVNO phenomenon expands, there is plenty of room for virtual offerings at various price points, aimed at sophisticated, data-hungry users rather than lower-end users.
Gamers are one such group, and Mexico is a country in which the MVNO sector is seeing rapid growth—to around 2.3 percent of the country’s mobile market at the end of the third quarter of 2020 from 1.4 percent a year earlier. So it makes a good deal of sense to design an MVNO built around meeting gamers’ needs.
The question arises, though, as to whether Easter Egg really does meet those needs. While 30 GB is a sizable allotment of data, the 8 GB and 5 GB packages may not be data-rich enough to satisfy the demands of today’s high-end games. Beyond the issue of quantity, though, these plans do not appear particularly specialized for gaming; the large allowances of voice calls and SMS would be more appropriate for a traditional user than for a gamer who lives online. Perhaps the benefits that the Easter Coins will unlock are gaming-specific, but that has not yet been made clear. Crunchyroll, a licenser and provider of entertainment content centered on Japanese popular media such as anime, seems like a good cultural match for gamers, although it is not itself a gaming service.