N-Gage is dead, long live Ovi Store?

Today, Nokia confirmed what many in the industry have known for months – its N-Gage games platform has no future. Well, no future beyond 2010, as it’s being phased out gradually in favour of the Ovi Store.

ME talked to director of X-Media Solutions Mark Ollila about the decision, and what it means for Nokia’s mobile gaming activities. Starting with the thinking behind today’s news.

“Since April, we’ve talked about the long-term goal for Nokia of integrating our services into seamless user experiences under the Ovi umbrella,” he says.

“Simplicity is important. Rather than having multiple channels for purchasing games, we’re converging to having the Ovi Store as the place to find and buy games. We’ve already got more than 1,000 games available on there, from over 150 developers and publishers, and games is the number two paid premium category behind apps, and the number two for overall downloads.”

What does this mean for N-Gage then, which relaunched as a cross-handset games service in April last year, following a beta launch in February?

“We are not releasing any more games on N-Gage, although the store - the ability to buy N-Gage games - will remain open until at least September 2010, and the N-Gage service will run through to the end of 2010," says Ollila. “All of the N-Gage games that have been purchased remain playable.”

48 games have been released so far for N-Gage, with Ollila saying that 12 more were in development. Nokia is talking to the developers and publishers of those titles with a view to bringing them to Ovi Store instead. The same applies for Nokia’s own in-development N-Gage games, like Yamake.

“We’re looking at all the IPs that we’ve had and saying okay, how do we bring those through to Ovi Store?” he says. “We’ve already announced plans to do it with one game, Dance Fabulous, which we’re bringing to Ovi Store by the end of this year in a touchscreen version.”

Is this the end of Nokia’s ambitions as a publisher of games, in favour of being a pure store-owner? Seemingly not.

“We will still be creating games that showcase what can be done with mobile,” he says. “We’re still publishing, and still bringing out what I would typically call strategic IPR – things that showcase what can be done on the platform. We’ve done that on N-Gage with games like Reset Generation, and we’ll be doing that in the future.”

Even so, today’s news will be seized upon by many people as final admission that N-Gage Mk. II was a flop. Nokia isn’t announcing how many people signed up for the service or bought games, but industry consensus is that its thunder was well and truly stolen by iPhone’s App Store, which launched a few months after it.

What has Nokia learned from N-Gage, though? What were the mistakes, and the successes?

“One lesson is the complexities of offering rich games content on a global scale,” says Ollila. “How do you handle the billing, the local marketing intricacies and the type of gaming experiences that work in different markets? And what do consumers actually want – is it the high-end games with connected features that N-Gage was delivering, or a much broader catalogue?”

It seems the lesson was that most wanted the latter. Even on N-Gage, Tetris was constantly the top selling game, along with poker and solitaire titles. Ollila also says that one lesson is that “variety of content is extremely important”. 48 games on N-Gage versus more than 20,000 on iPhone is a statistic that tells its own story. iPhone might be hugely overcrowded as a storefront, but it has a hugely wider choice of games to play too.

Ollila points out, rightly, that N-Gage saw some innovative, ahead-of-their-time games – particularly Reset Generation, which could be played on N-Gage but also on PC or Facebook. Meanwhile, he also thinks N-Gage did encourage developers – those that worked with Nokia on a first-party basis anyway – to explore new IP and original gameplay.

Ollila’s new role involves working closely with publishers to bring their games to Ovi Store, so it’s perhaps unrealistic to expect him to stick the knife into the big mobile games firms like EA, Gameloft and Glu for not sinking resources into original N-Gage games, rather than ports of their Java titles.

Even so, ME asks that question. Could N-Gage have had more support from the publishers? Ollila parries it. “In many ways, I’m quite happy about the engagement levels we have with our publishers and developers,” he says. “A lot of the internal conversations we had about innovation were also discussed openly with publishers.”

With that in mind, he expresses optimism about Nokia’s plans for gaming going forward, saying that the company is working on several of its own games-related projects for Ovi Store, while also helping developers hook their games up to other Nokia services, such as Ovi Maps.