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Why Nokia really is going ahead with NextGenGaming (N-Gage)

by krisse | posted on 09 October 2006

A little bird told me about your article about my article about Nokia's sponsorship of the BAFTA game awards. I'm quite flattered, it took about five minutes to post and I didn't really expect many people to read the news item, let alone take it apart with a news item about a news item!

Just to explain though, I said Nokia were "definitely" carrying on with next generation gaming not because of their BAFTA sponsorship alone, but because of the context it happened in, which I didn't bother putting in such a brief news item because... well, it was a brief news item!

I try to stop news items I write from being too bogged down in details that aren't of interest to everyone, but if you're interested and want an explanation of what events were in my head when I used such a strong word as "definitely", and why I'd use it again, here you go:

In February of this year, Nokia bought a large chunk of Bitboys, a 3D graphics hardware company that provides 3D graphics hardware for mobile devices.

At a major event in New York a couple of weeks ago, Nokia launched a brand new smartphone model called the N95, which contains a 3D graphics accelerator chip. There is no real need for a 3D accelerator chip in a phone other than for 3D gaming. The N95 is due out in late 2006 / early 2007.

Another Nokia smartphone to carry a 3D chip is the recently-launched N93, which also contains the first few levels of System Rush Evolution, a high budget Nokia Next Gen game due for release in 2007.

In May this year, Nokia had one of the largest and most magnificent exhibits at the E3 2006 games expo (it won GameSpot's "best stand" award), none of which was devoted to current N-Gage hardware. They had totally new next generation games running on their latest smartphones, including a very smooth good-looking 3D game called "One: Who's Next" running on a prototype N93.

Also in May, the games publisher Gameloft announced a long term game publishing partnerships with Nokia to produce games for their next generation smartphone games platform.

Again at E3 in May, Nokia and third party developers all said the new next gen games would be released on the latest Nokia smartphones starting in the first half of 2007. (That's where I got the "in a few months" from, as well as the corroborating announcements from EA, Gameloft and other sources that appeared months later.)

In the middle of 2006, Nokia gradually discontinued the N-Gage QD and the games, so you cannot easily buy the current generation N-Gage or QD anywhere except second hand. Nokia haven't properly advertised the first generation N-Gage hardware or games since 2005 (and indeed before its launch they'd said it had until Xmas 2005 to prove itself).

In September 2006, games publisher EA (who account for roughly half of all games sales worldwide) announced a long term partnership with Nokia to provide games for its next generation smartphone games platform, due to launch in 2007.

Given all the above events that have happened in the run-up to the BAFTA sponsorship, the only reasonable explanation for the sponsorship was to preserve the visibility of the N-Gage name, and the only reasonable explanation for that is because they want to somehow use the name on new games in the future.

As for "And will that be a success? It seems even krisse doubts that"... that's not quite the case.

I said it's a terrible idea to use the N-Gage name, but that doesn't mean I think the game platform itself will be a failure. I said that the N-Gage name is more of a liability than an advantage, and it won't help them at all in the hardcore gaming community.

But if Nokia's plan is to sell games across their range of smartphones (which account for something like half of all smartphone sales in the world), they may not need the approval of the gaming community, any more than the Lord Of The Rings films needed the approval of the Tolkien-loving literary community (and some that I know REALLY loathe the films).

The N-Gage and the QD are just 100% standard 2003 model Nokia S60 smartphones with a horizontal casing instead of a vertical one, they're not games consoles in any sense of the phrase, despite Nokia's rather deceptive marketing. If you break the DRM on N-Gage games, they'll run on other S60 Nokia smartphones from 2003, or even non-Nokia S60s from that period.

The N-Gage and QD models only sold two million over two years (a bit more than the 30,000 that Gizmondo managed) but the actual hardware used by N-Gage in the form of other Nokia S60 smartphones sells tens of millions a year, more than all handheld consoles put together, and the sales gap is widening all the time. The N-Gage/S60 hardware itself is the most popular type of smartphone in the world, gaming on phones is immensely popular and growing faster than traditional gaming, and many people do want to game on all kinds of phones including S60s.

But it seems most don't want to buy a phone physically designed for gaming, and most don't want to buy games that come on immensely expensive game cards you have to buy separately and carry with you whenever you fancy a game.

All that smartphone users will see on the Next Gen gaming system outlined by Nokia are games on standard-shaped smartphones, available at the press of a button to be stored on their phone or PC, that are free to download and try, that can be downloaded anywhere through wifi or 3G, and paid for through a user's phone bill.

The amount of effort curious gamers have to go to in order to try or buy games using Nokia's proposed system is absolutely minimal; they could do it in bed or on the bus, so the effect of a gaming brand is also absolutely minimal, especially if most potential customers are buying the hardware anyway for non-gaming reasons. (You might well say "If gaming system brands don't affect phone game sales, why is Nokia bothering to prop up the N-Gage name?", and I'd agree with you that it's a waste of time.)

If the games are good, people will buy the full versions, if the games are rubbish, they won't, which is how it should be really. Of course no one knows how good the games will be yet...

Anyhow, that's what I would have written, if I'd done the article long-hand...

Wish you still here again! - You can discuss this article on our discussion board.

krisse doesn't use capitals...