Nokia quietly launched its N-Gage mobile gaming platform last night, following the recent 'First Access' trial of the service, which came to an end last week. To head off confusion, this isn't the unsuccessful gaming handset N-Gage, which came and went a few years ago. It's a new games platform running across several of Nokia's Nseries multimedia phones, offering 3D and connected games.
Anyway, it’s definitely relevant for this blog. Partly because Nokia announced a while back that it’s working with Sulake to bring Habbo Hotel to N-Gage in some form (although it’s all gone quiet since that announcement, so exactly what form is unclear).
But also because N-Gage is likely to be an appealing platform for developers looking to create mobile MMOs. Why? Well, it offers a connected platform and community - N-Gage Arena - which these games can feed into, as well as supporting significantly larger file sizes (one of the launch games is 29MB).
MMOs could easily fit into the N-Gage Arena community, which is an Xbox Live style mixture of friend lists, game discovery and achievements. So besides levelling up your character in an MMO, you’d be earning points to boost your N-Gage Points ranking.
Hopefully, people won’t see N-Gage as a chance to try to squeeze PC-style MMOs into mobile phones. It should be about finding gameplay mechanics that suit the way people play on their mobiles - often short bursts, but augmented by longer sessions at home in the evenings, while doing other things (like watching TV).
Nokia seems to have a good grasp on this, talking about how games don’t have to be simultaneously massively multiplayer - i.e. I can play online, and interact in some way with you, even though you’re not online at the same time as me. It will be interesting to see if developers take this concept and run with it.
N-Gage website
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