Nokia’s N-Gage platform has taken its sweet time coming to market, and I think most were surprised to not see the platform officially released at the Game Developers Conference this week, where Nokia’s head of Multimedia Anssi Vanjoki gave a keynote speech. James Burland, at Nokia Creative, was able to spend a few minutes chatting with the Product Manager for N-Gage last week at the Mobile World Congress, and has put some thought into a few reasons why he believes that N-Gage could be like the current iTunes/iPhone gaming ‘platform.’
It’s yet to be seen if Nokia will have a way to manage N-Gage games on the PC, but I have to say that if they do, I could see that as a HUGE plus for the platform and getting users to purchase games through it. Personally, I think that N-Gage has some huge potential, assuming Nokia actually launches it sometime soon, and they don’t botch it somehow. Unfortunately, for Nokia, software has never really been a big strength.
I really want this to work. Mobile phone gaming has been languishing since… well, since forever really! ‘Huge potential’, I could not agree more, take your time Nokia, take your time…