Ilkka Raiskinen on Nokia's Gaming Ambitions

April 14th, 2004, 10:55 Posted By: wraggster

As the Finnish mobile communications giant unveils the second generation of N-Gage hardware, Rob Fahey speaks to Nokia's head of games, Ilkka Raiskinen, about the company's plans for the future - and lessons from the past year.


You might reasonably expect Nokia's head of games to be somewhat guarded around the games press. It's been a tough year for the ambitions of the Finnish company in that sector, after all - one in which the firm has been repeatedly savaged in the media, first in the specialist press but later in mainstream newspapers and magazines, for a series of disastrous decisions related to the launch of the N-Gage console. From the deeply flawed design of the system, through the cringe-worthy press conference at E3 last year, to the damaging post-launch dithering about sales figures, Nokia has had a tough time of it - and the press has been there every step of the way to make sure that their failures are highlighted. You could understand, then, if the man at whose desk the buck for the company's entire gaming operations stops wasn't happy to see games media representatives on his doorstep.

In fact, the opposite is true. Ilkka Raiskinen, Nokia's vice president in charge of games, was honest, open and talkative when we met him in the icy Finnish capital of Helsinki to discuss the company's new update to the N-Gage platform, N-Gage QD, its forthcoming portfolio of software and online services, its plans for the future and - perhaps - the lessons it has learned from the past year. Raiskinen, in fact, embodies the attitude of every Nokia executive we met at the company's stunning headquarters building - although there's some obvious trepidation at showing the QD to the games press for the first time, he, and the company as a whole, exudes a quiet confidence that is very different from the brash, self-assured and arrogant brand of confidence which was in evidence from the firm at the original N-Gage launch in London in February of last year.

Then, Nokia assured us that they were entering the games industry with a product which would quickly grab an enormous slice of the marketplace that the rest of the platform holders had completely ignored. They would take over this new "mobile online gaming" sector, become a major player, and even the might of Nintendo's Game Boy Advance was inconsequential. Nokia wasn't a company used to losing battles in the mobile space, and it showed. A year later, the mood has changed - there's a tacit admission that a battle was lost (although how badly is a matter of argument), but a quiet determination that the war will be won. Lessons have been learned; Raiskinen, and Nokia, are now confident not because of the company's past successes, but because they believe that in the QD and their forthcoming software line-ups, they have a genuinely excellent combination of platform and titles. Lessons have been learned, and with them humility - and Nokia is no longer an outsider barging into the games industry without understanding what it's getting into, but rather is a games industry company with the experience of an exceptionally tough product launch behind it.


Learning Experience

In fact, Nokia has been learning lessons right from the moment that N-Gage took its first public bow - even if it hasn't always showed it in public. N-Gage QD, a device which answers most of the key criticisms about its predecessor, has been in planning since well before the launch of the original N-Gage, Raiskinen tells us. "We started to get feedback after the initial launch [in February 2003], and after the launch we discussed which features we should incorporate in the first version and which in the second version," he explains.

"We started to develop QD before October 7th [the global launch date of the N-Gage] - it was a pretty tight schedule and that's something we want to continue to have, if need be," he adds, referring to the company's intention to continue adding new N-Gage decks to the product line-up as it perceives a market desire for them.

Although Raiskinen is very honest about the fact that the company made mistakes with the N-Gage, he's adamant that plenty of things went right, as well - and he says that Nokia never even considered dropping the N-Gage brand and starting fresh with the QD. "No, not at all," he responds when asked about the possibility "We have been getting critique on various features of N-Gage, but I still believe that N-Gage - of course we have been conducting some studies there, and we want to prove that N-Gage means mobile online gaming, and the content and the games are the key, not the device."

"We didn't consider [changing the brand] at all, and we believe that the N-Gage brand has a good appeal, especially amongst younger people and maybe casual gamers," he continues. "I think the feedback very often has come from the hardcore gamers who have compared the game experience on N-Gage to the game experience on the consoles, and of course they have been right in criticising N-Gage from that perspective."


Hardware vs. Business

The idea that games are the key to the N-Gage's future success, not hardware, is one that Raiskinen returns to time and again - and it's a theme which will be familiar to many industry watchers, since it echoes the one constantly visited by that other recent entrant to the platform holders enclosure, Microsoft. Indeed, Raiskinen freely admits that the N-Gage platform has been designed from the outset with the need to be a strong business model within Nokia's operations at the forefront, rather than any other concern.

"We need to use the economies of scale that we have," he explains. "The whole strategy is about being able to use those components which we have anyway, and test whether we can create a good enough games platform. Creating an optimal games device is easy - big screen, lots of horsepower, big battery - but making money and creating a business case that's viable, that's the tricky part. And now we are betting, or you might want to say gambling, on the fact that we can build on our mobile phone heritage in this space.

"Whether it succeeds or not, we will know in a couple of years time, but surely the strategy from our perspective is simple - we use the things that we have in-house, and try to see if they work. Once again, big screen, big battery, big processor - putting that in a device, that's fairly simple."

Although perhaps not intentionally, Raiskinen's comments about the ease with which a company can build an "optimal games device" sounds like a comment about Sony's PlayStation Portable - a console which certainly sounds like it will fulfil the criteria of "big screen, big battery, big processor," and unlike the N-Gage will be sold, initially at least, on the basis of a per-unit loss. Given the advent of such a device on the horizon (and further competition from Nintendo's DS), doesn't Nokia feel serious pressure on its N-Gage plans?

"We have been feeling all the time that we are in a hurry," Raiskinen admits. "That's why - some people have asked, why didn't you delay the launch of N-Gage until you had a better portfolio, and our thinking is that we needed to prepare, and work, and get feedback on the Arena, on GPRS performance, on wireless performance, on the various dynamics that you have in different markets - like, how do you manage the problems and challenges of combining games distribution and mobile phone distribution - all of those, we need to solve in order to be successful.

"We have had a sense of urgency, and you could ask if that was the right priority - the future will tell us. But definitely, we need to move forward, and we feel the pressure, and we feel the need to be faster and execute in a more efficient way."

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