Yesterday, Nokia revealed more details about the reincarnation of its less-than-successful N-Gage brand. Rather than a single device, the new N-Gage will be a mobile games platform that allows a single implementation of a game to run across all handsets using the Symbian S60 3rd edition software platform. The platform also provides an end-to-end consumer experience in terms of discovery, purchase and downloading of games content.

Comment: We’d like to congratulate Nokia on what we think is a largely positive step in the development of the mobile games market. The N-Gage platform not only cuts one of the key costs of mobile games development - handset porting - but it also provides the kind of user experience we have long been advocating. The consumer side of the platform is designed to ease discovery and purchase of content, and also offers the opportunity to ‘try before you buy’ - all of these serve to remove barriers to purchase, and should increase the likelihood of consumers coming back for more. Indeed, Nokia is so confident in its new platform that it is putting its money where its mouth is and developing and selling its own games for N-Gage, as well as inking deals with several big-name publishers.

However, while we admire Nokia’s laudable intentions, we think it’s a shame that this will only be experienced by a relatively small number of mobile users. Obviously, N-Gage will only work on Nokia devices, but it will also be restricted to those handsets running Symbian S60 3rd edition. Nokia states that restricting N-Gage to owners of relatively high-end devices is part of its strategy, but we wonder if it’s not in danger of getting stuck in a niche.

Nokia is touting N-Gage as a way of decreasing fragmentation and thus development costs for mobile, and to an extent this is true. It certainly reduces the number of ports that a developer has to create for Nokia Series 60 handsets. However, it also introduces yet another non-interoperable technology platform to sit alongside Java and Qualcomm’s BREW. Is it really such a good thing for the industry to be moving ever further away from any kind of standard?

From the operator perspective, Nokia points out that while N-Gage may cannibalise some revenues, it could also potentially grow the games market as a whole, and increase consumer usage of mobile data from downloading games and connected gaming services. However, those operators who have a strong games offering may well be wary of giving N-Gage a helping hand. This could be a key issue for Nokia - while it can accept credit-card payments over N-Gage, in reality this is a barrier to consumer purchase, especially for casual players. Integration with operator billing systems is required if Nokia is to achieve the kinds of sales volumes it requires.

Overall, we think N-Gage should be beneficial for the mobile games industry as a whole. The fact that Nokia is taking mobile games so seriously and throwing so much weight behind the space proves the point that many developers and operators have long been stressing - the mobile games market may have stalled a little, but it just needs the right kinds of services and content to give it a jump-start.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 8th, 2007 at 5:19 pm and is filed under Cell Phone Applications, Symbian. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.