Feature

How Nokia's N-Gage can seize the limelight back from iPhone

And what else Nokia could and should announce at next month's Games Summit

How Nokia's N-Gage can seize the limelight back from iPhone
Late next month, Nokia is holding its Nokia Games Summit event in Rome. It's a chance for Nokia's gaming execs, developer and publisher partners, and journalists to gather and talk shop.

Naturally, attendees will be expecting some big announcements at the event, not least because it comes at an important time for Nokia.

Having spent more than two years preparing the second coming of N-Gage, Nokia's mobile gaming thunder has been well and truly stolen by iPhone this year.

Yes, N-Gage is live, it's got some impressive games already, and is rolling out on millions of handsets - Nokia has delivered on its promises.

But the hype is with Apple, which must be hugely frustrating for Nokia's N-Gage team, for all their public declarations that iPhone's success is good for mobile gaming as a whole.

With that in mind, the Games Summit is a chance for Nokia to seize back some of the limelight. So what should or could the company do in Rome? Here's a few thoughts.

NOKIA SHOULD... Shout about how important mobile gaming is

This might sound obvious, but now would be a good time for Nokia to restate how big mobile games are in the scheme of things.

The company has a lot of content irons in the fire at the moment, what with music, mapping, user-generated content and so on. Rome is a chance to hammer home the point that games remains a priority for Nokia, above the level of the dedicated games teams.

Weirdly, iPhone's success might have made that more likely. Apple clearly now sees gaming as hugely important to its iPhone strategy. The message to Nokia's highest execs - who increasingly see Apple as their major competitor - should be clear.

NOKIA MIGHT... Announce a 'Comes With Games' initiative

We broke this rumour during the Games Convention show in Leipzig, and reactions from within the industry have indicated that it wasn't that wide of the mark.

Nokia's soon-to-launch Comes With Music scheme is basically 'buy the handset, get unlimited music downloads for a year for no extra cost'. Could such a model work for mobile games too? Rome may be the venue for it to be announced.

However, it might not work in exactly the same way. For example, a Comes With Games handset may simply have a number of full N-Gage titles preloaded on it, rather than offering a year's 'free' games.

NOKIA SHOULD... Give out some N-Gage numbers

Forget telling us how many countries N-Gage is being used in. The time has come to cough up some proper data, like the number of active N-Gage players, the number of handsets the N-Gage client is installed on, and maybe some headline sales figures for the most popular games.

It would give the platform credibility against iPhone's challenge, set N-Gage up nicely for its second wave of development, and maybe nudge a few more publishers into announcing support for it, alongside their iPhone activities.

At the recent Develop Mobile conference, Ideaworks3D's Tim Closs outlined some speculative numbers for the potential size and value of the N-Gage platform, and they were pretty mindboggling.

Hopefully Nokia will now give us the official story, and put some of the iPhone hype (much of it deserved, but some of it not) into perspective.

NOKIA MIGHT... Reveal the new direction for SNAP Mobile

SNAP Mobile hasn't exactly been high-profile during its history. Nokia's multiplayer Java gaming platform does have a bunch of games running on it, but the average consumer would be hard-pressed to find them.

Recently, Nokia confirmed that SNAP Mobile is undergoing something of a revamp, so the Rome event could be the venue for that to be announced - and to show that Nokia's gaming activities go beyond N-Gage.

NOKIA SHOULD... Announce an exciting new batch of N-Gage games

We've nearly worked our way through N-Gage's first batch of firstparty titles, with just Creebies, Yamake and ONE still to come out.

One thing the company has done really well so far is with first-party development, thanks to the impressive Reset Generation, Creatures of the Deep, Dirk Dagger and others. So it's about time they revealed the next batch of N-Gage hits.

That goes for third-party publishers too. Recent weeks have seen the announcement of Spore Origins (EA Mobile) and Resident Evil: Degeneration (Capcom), but it's at this point in N-Gage Mk II's lifetime that it would be good to see more publishers and developers ramping up their support for the platform.

NOKIA MIGHT... Do something with ad-funded games

This is pure speculation on our part, but we wonder if Nokia has any plans to further explore the ad-funded mobile games area, either within N-Gage, or elsewhere.

After all, Nokia as a company is getting more involved with mobile advertising, and earlier this year announced that more than 800 ad-funded mobile games would be distributed through its MOSH community, courtesy of a deal with Greystripe.

If Nokia is planning any more ad-funded gaming ventures, Rome may be the time to announce them.

Although talking of MOSH, several developers we've spoken to would welcome clarification on Nokia's part of its strategy with that - many are concerned that pirated versions of their games continue to be available on the service.

NOKIA SHOULD... Outline its N-Gage SDK roadmap

Much of the buzz around iPhone gaming has concerned its touchscreen and accelerometer controls. Neither of which has yet been a factor for N-Gage, although Nokia's gaming team have publicly confirmed that both will eventually be part of the N-Gage SDK.

Next month would be a good time to give more details on this. When can we expect to play touchscreen and/or accelerometer-powered N-Gage games? What's more, it would be good to have some clarity on when features like GPS and hardware-acceleration will make it into the SDK roadmap too.

Now, we're not naive - key development partners are presumably better informed on all this than journalists. But as part of fighting back against the iPhone hype juggernaut, Nokia might do well to talk publicly about its plans to incorporate these advanced features into N-Gage games, rather than keep the information to its partners.

NOKIA MIGHT... Announce a dedicated gaming handset

This is truly speculative stuff, but Nokia events often include a handset announcement or two. And while nobody expects the company to go back to its original N-Gage strategy, what chance a gaming-themed N-series handset?

Think the equivalent of Nokia's XpressMusic range of music phones. And if the company is doing a 'Comes With Games' scheme, what better way to promote it than with a handset targeted at gamers - without making the same mistakes that the first N-Gage did, of course.

NOKA SHOULD... Nail down this augmented reality business

At recent conferences, Nokia's execs have been really big on 'augmented reality' - incorporating the real world into N-Gage games. However, with the greatest respect, it's all been a bit... woolly. Far-fetched, even.

What does augmented reality really mean for mobile gaming? Will it result in better games, as opposed to sexy-sounding tech demos? What's the difference between augmented reality and mixed reality anyway?

Don't get me wrong, a lot of the ideas around this area are genuinely exciting - the suggestion in a recent Nokia keynote that the map data for a user's current location could be used as the basis for a game level for example.

But if Nokia is as committed to pushing augmented reality games as it seems, it would be good to have some more hard-headed talk about what, how, when and most importantly why.

NOKIA MIGHT... Put N-Gage onto non-Nokia mobile handsets

Again, hugely speculative (hence the 'might'). But the question's been asked since the beginning of N-Gage Mk II: why shouldn't Nokia make the platform available on other manufacturers' handsets?

On a business level, it's not hard to imagine N-Gage being at least available on Series 60 handsets from other firms (on a technical level, of course, this might be a different story).

But what about capitalising on Nokia's increasingly warm relationship with Microsoft to extend N-Gage to Windows Mobile handsets?

Or - and this is just a mischievous thought - why not take a few N-Gage franchises to iPhone? It's all extra revenue, and after all, Nokia is supposedly a services company now, not just a handset maker.

NOKIA SHOULD... Put up or shut up on the N73 and N93

The N73 and N93 have been announced as N-Gage-compatible phones for a long, long time, with no sign of the client actually arriving. Indeed, Nokia has admitted that getting it working on the N73 in particular has been a technical struggle.

Rome would be a good time to put owners of those handsets out of their misery - either by releasing the client, or by biting the bullet and saying it won't be available for them after all.

The latter would be bad news for those consumers. But if Nokia still has people trying to get N-Gage running smoothly on those two handsets, when they could be spending their time getting it working on newer models...
That's our views, but what do you think? What else could and/or should Nokia be doing to take N-Gage and its other gaming activities to the next level? Post a comment with your thoughts.

Contributing Editor

Stuart is a freelance journalist and blogger who's been getting paid to write stuff since 1998. In that time, he's focused on topics ranging from Sega's Dreamcast console to robots. That's what you call versatility. (Or a short attention span.)