It’s not that long since mobile developer Fishlabs announced its intentions to break away from distribution portals and mobile operators in favour of going direct to the gamers.

Nokia has just announced it will now be working with Fishlabs to bring five enhanced versions of its games to the N-Gage platform. Scheduled for release in 2009 are conversions of Powerboat Challenge, Rally Master Pro and Snowboard Hero, followed by Galaxy on Fire and Blades & Magic in early 2010.

“The outstanding quality of Fishlabs mobile games is almost legendary, and we are pleased to have gained one of the best developers for N-Gage with Fishlabs,” says Gregg Sauter, director of third party games publishing at Nokia.

“Fishlabs portfolio of multiple award-winning games is especially popular with core gamers and, thanks to the superior performance of the N-Gage platform; Nokia will be able to win over many fans of Fishlabs as well as new gamers for N-Gage.”

Distributing N-Gage games directly is obviously a much harder task than taking mobile games directly to the consumer, so in many respects Fishlabs hasn’t gone back on its decision to avoid distribution portals, so much as stepped to the side of it.

“The N-Gage cooperation with Nokia is one of the most important milestones for Fishlabs since its founding,” adds Michael Schade, CEO of Fishlabs Entertainment.

“Being able to market games on millions of devices with the marketing power of the world's largest mobile phone manufacturer is a major success for us. Our strategy of relying exclusively on high-quality, innovative mobile games fits perfectly with that of Nokia to sell only the best products on N-Gage.”

2010 is a long way off for a games platform that’s seen such hard times as the N-Gage, however, so we’ll have to wait and see just how well the new partnership performs.