N-Gage boss slams ad-funded gaming

Could Nokia give away N-Gage games for free? It's not as silly a question as it seems, given the buzz around ad-funded Java games, and Nokia's separate plans for 'Comes With Music' handsets, where users buy a phone and get unlimited access to music for no extra cost.

With those in mind, you might think a 'Comes With N-Gage' scheme is a possibility, or that Nokia might strike some deals to include adverts in N-Gage games.

So will it?

In a word, no. And that's from the mouth of Jakko Kaidesoja himself, head of Nokia's N-Gage business.

"The concept of free is not a very appealing concept when you are investing a lot of money and creative power in creating the content, and trying to make something that will make people happy," he says.

"Our first and foremost task as a mobile gaming industry is to prove there is value in mobile gaming. When you have proven that value, then you can think about monetising it in different ways. But if you have a bunch of crappy games that you give away for free by selling some ad space, I don't think it's a long-term business model. You destroy the value by creating as low-production cost games as possible and giving them away for free."

I tossed the 'free' question in at the end of a longer interview almost as an afterthought, but he had strong and well thought-out views on the risks of the ad-funded model.

"I'm really passionate about this thing, because I'm seeing things I don't like even sometimes very near to me and I get upset," he says.

Possibly this is a reference to the news earlier this month that Nokia's MOSH service has added 800 ad-funded free games to its catalogue. It seems the N-Gage team isn't adopting a similar strategy.

"We need to prove the value first," he says. "With N-Gage we are taking the first steps with richer graphics, better gameplay, and adding in friends, community and context. But we haven't proven the value yet. If we send the message out to people that mobile games are free, but they are not very high quality… I don't think that's really the thing we should be doing."

However, Kaidesoja's views are nuanced, since he admits different business models could have a role to play in the future.

"We are not ruling our advertising titles, subscription titles or all-you-can-eat models in the future, but they would come in the secondary phase once we have got feedback from users," he says. "We have a long-term strategy behind N-Gage, so we don't want to do something as a hasty trial that destroys value."

Stand by for the rest of our interview with Kaidesoja, where he talks about the "smooth ride" of N-Gage's launch, Nokia's plans to extend N-Gage beyond Nseries handsets, and how distribution of N-Gage games will evolve.

Update: You can read the interview here.