No handset maker has done more to try and drive mobile gaming forward in recent years than Nokia.

Even when its initiatives haven't come off - think original N-Gage - the company has shown a clear and relatively unwavering commitment to mobile games, from Snake through to the reborn N-Gage platform. We'll tactfully forget about MOSH for now.

But following Tero Ojanpera's speech at GDC Mobile today, and our recent interview with the company's games tech guru Mark Ollila, something's crystallized in our mind.

Nokia has a bit of a problem with N-Gage.

Here's what (and why). GDC is a big deal for Nokia, as it's super-keen to court developers to bring their games or game ideas to N-Gage.

A big part of that message is stressing the technical innovation that's capable on the platform. So Ojanpera talked about mashing up music and games in his speech today, and showed a new title that lets players turn a map of their real-world location into a virtual track to race on.

He talked about Nokia Image Space - something Ollila also covered in our interview - and asked why more mobile games developers aren't making innovative use of the handset camera in their titles.

In short, Nokia wants to encourage mobile games developers to throw caution to the wind and use the whizzy features of its high-end handsets to create new and original games.

It wants to foster innovation, and has launched several developer contests to further reward it. This should be great if you're a developer.

And yet...

Ask any developer or publisher whether they're planning to make a camera-enabled location-based multiplayer game for N-Gage anytime soon, and most will say 'No'. We know, because we've asked them.

And often, they'll point you in the direction of the N-Gage sales charts by way of explanation. When Tetris, poker, Monopoly, solitaire and well-worn console franchises are what's selling, you can see why developers see more risk in heading for the bleeding edge of innovation.

Or, to put it another way, when a Nokia exec gets up at a conference and talks about augmented reality or mapping mash-ups, many developers are thinking 'Sure, I can DO those games for N-Gage, but can YOU sell them?'

That's the problem with N-Gage, as things stand.

We're not saying that just because Tetris is big on N-Gage now, Nokia's brave and ambitious visions for the future of mobile gaming won't come true in the next few years.

The problem is that many developers are struggling to see how the former leads to the latter, and at what point they can dive in without losing their shirt.

We'd hate to see Nokia abandoning its keynote speeches and jettisoning its support for experimentation and innovation among its developer partners. We'll always give space to Ollila and his colleagues' blue-sky thinking for that reason.

But it's just as important to show developers how it plans to turn the resulting games into bona-fide hits with the millions of people who own N-Gage capable handsets.