So, how is Next Gen N-Gage doing?

August 31st, 2007, 23:04 Posted By: wraggster

via allabout ngage

Nokia's Go Play event in London on the 29th and 30th of August brought with it a string of important revelations including new devices (the N81, N81 8GB, N95 8GB, 5310 and 5610) and new services (Ovi, Nokia Music Store and the Next Gen N-Gage platform). As our name suggests, All About N-Gage is going to concentrate on the Next Gen N-Gage announcements, but if you want coverage of the other stuff you ought to visit our sister site All About Symbian.

A while back we published an article over on AAS about the mistakes Nokia made with the original generation N-Gage, and how these could be corrected by the Next Gen Platform. Now Nokia has revealed its hand, at least a bit more, by revealing some of the platform's compatible phones and launch games. What do we make of all this?

Games
The Next Gen launch line-up announced by Nokia at Go Play was fairly impressive. There was a large number of games (23 specific titles plus four other publishers who haven't yet announced titles, so at least 27 confirmed games in total) and the games were spread across a wide range of genres and audiences:

- Hardcore gamers received things like Brothers In Arms, Asphalt 3 and One.

- Casual gamers were served by titles such as Mile High Pinball, Midnight Pool 3D and Block Breaker Deluxe.

- Online gamers found three online multiplayer titles at launch including Pro Series Golf, Snakes Subsonic and Hooked On: Creatures Of The Deep.

- New gamers have various titles such as Dogz (a Nintendogs clone), Brain Challenge (a Brain Training clone) and Sims 2 Pets to tempt them.

Most genres are catered for: arcade, 3D shooter, 2D shooter, card and board games, racing, online, puzzle, simulation, sports, fighting. A few genres were conspicuous by their absence however, especially RPGs, strategy and adventure games. The lack of RPG and strategy genres is particularly curious as Nokia themselves published some of the best portable strategy and RPG games ever made on the original gen N-Gage, with titles such as Pathway To Glory and Rifts receiving extremely positive reviews, even from websites which generally disliked the N-Gage. We shall have to wait and see if these gaps are filled between now and the launch.

Overall though, an excellent start for Nokia, especially when you consider that there are many games yet to be revealed, and there may be more publishers who join the platform between now and the launch in November. On the day that Next Gen N-Gage goes live, there may be as many as 30 or 40 games available or imminent, compared to around a dozen when the original N-Gage launched.

Phones
One issue above all else seems cause confusion when discussing Next Gen N-Gage: there's still a misconception, even among many technology journalists, that Next Gen N-Gage is a console-like standalone device. It isn't of course, it's a platform which is being made available on a number of Symbian S60 3rd Edition smartphones. Indeed the original N-Gage was itself technically just an S60 1st Edition smartphone with a horizontal layout, it contained no gaming-specific hardware or software at all, and Nokia could have made that into a general platform across other S60 1st Edition smartphones (many argue they should have).

The following phones were announced as being compatible with Next Gen N-Gage games: Nokia N73, N81, N81 8GB, N93, N93i, N95 and N95 8GB. Nokia also said they would be adding more phones to this list over time, although it's unclear whether this will include any more current models. It could be that the list will only expand as Nokia releases new S60 3rd Edition models.

As All About Symbian's Ewan Spence pointed out, from a technical standpoint the presence of the relatively old N73 on the list means that virtually ANY of the dozens of current S60 3rd Edition smartphones should be capable of running the new games. It therefore seems to be a deliberate (and hopefully temporary) decision on Nokia's part to exclude the vast majority of current S60 3rd Edition smartphone models from the Next Gen platform, which is very strange indeed. Why throw away potential customers? Why keep the userbase smaller than it needs to be? Why does an N73 owner get to use the platform when an N76 owner doesn't? What about all the popular non-Nseries S60 3rd Edition devices like the Nokia 6120 and 6110?

Whatever Nokia does, this discrimination between models should gradually fade away if Next Gen N-Gage compatibility becomes a standard feature on most or all future S60 models. The platform may gradually grow and grow into something with a userbase of tens of millions, perhaps hundreds of millions (S60 phones as a whole have now sold well over 100 million in total, and their sales are growing at an ever-faster rate).

"But people hate N-Gage, right? Why is Nokia even bothering? N-Gage sucks..."
Perhaps Nokia's most difficult task is trying to give the Next Gen N-Gage a good reputation in the gaming world. Rightly or wrongly, the original N-Gage wasn't just criticised but openly made fun of by most gaming journalists and gamers, sometimes even shop retailers while selling N-Gage games to customers. Hardly an enviable position for any brand. Nokia will have to try even harder when the actual launch of the Next Gen N-Gage service happens in November.

...or will they?

Courting the current gaming world may be difficult, but that doesn't make it important. The Next Gen N-Gage platform won't be launching on dedicated gaming hardware, it will be launching on mobile phones that millions of people have already bought anyway even without the games. The N95 alone has already sold more in six months than the N-Gage and N-Gage QD managed in three years. Add in the sales of the other compatible models, and the yet-to-launch Next Gen N-Gage already has a userbase many times bigger than the original generation N-Gage ever had.

Indeed, in number terms the Next Gen N-Gage probably already has a userbase bigger than the Xbox 360, Nintendo Wii or PlayStation 3. Of course not everyone who owns a Next Gen N-Gage compatible phone will actually buy the games, but the fact that Nokia have already achieved this size of userbase two months before launch gives us an idea of how vast the Next Gen N-Gage's reach could be in a few years time.

Perhaps phone game companies just don't need to give a monkeys about the gaming press, at least in the form it takes now. Current games sites and magazines are devoted almost entirely to games consoles that sell about 30 million a year in total, whereas phones sell about 1000 million a year in total. Even if all consoles gamers suddenly started buying phones instead of consoles, it would only increase phone sales by about 3% at most (and as console gamers probably buy phones anyway it might not increase sales at all).

The sort of sales and publicity support network that console manufacturers depend on just isn't as important with something like the Next Gen N-Gage. There are no games retailers involved because Next Gen N-Gage games are sold directly to the user through the internet. There are no limits on the shelf space in the online game shop because it's online, so the shop can stock all Next Gen games forever, which is good for the "long tail" customers that make up the majority of budget game sales. There's also no direct need for a gaming press because all the games will have free online demos downloadable direct to the phone just like the games. People will be able to decide for themselves which games they want by actually trying them, and the price is so low (6 to 10 euros to buy, even less for rentals) that potential customers will be more willing to take a risk anyway.

Perhaps the most important thing that Nokia can do from a marketing point of view is to make sure that as many people as possible can pay for games through operator billing. Being just one click away from buying a game, especially when it only costs 6 to 10 euros and you can try a free demo first, is something that will tempt a lot of people to go ahead and actually make the purchase.

If Nokia can get just 10% of their existing customers to buy N-Gage games on a regular basis, the N-Gage brand's reputation amongst console gamers will be completely irrelevant, because N-Gage alone will be outselling all console games put together.

And if Nokia has even mild success with the Next Gen N-Gage, you can bet that other phone makers will introduce their own rival platforms (especially Sony Ericsson, who have access to the PlayStation brand). Instead of N-Gage being a dead end, as most hardcore gamers would have you believe, it could well be the beginning of a new phone-based path that mainstream gaming will take.

Perhaps one day soon, most commercial game sales will be phone game sales, in which case Nokia is doing exactly the right thing by pressing on with N-Gage and ignoring its console-obsessed critics.

A Cautionary Tale

You only have to look at very very recent video game history to see an example of just how conservative and out of touch the gaming press can be: Nintendo's DS and Wii consoles were originally dismissed by a surprisingly large number of gaming journalists and games industry analysts as bizarre underpowered novelty items from a failing company, which would soon be crushed by the technically far superior offerings from Sony and Microsoft. There are still a few journalists and analysts who maintain this position, and also add that the DS and Wii don't represent "real gaming" so their immense sales somehow "don't count".

Despite the criticism from "real" gamers, Nintendo are now outselling all other consoles put together, selling every DS and Wii they can possibly manufacture, dominating every console games chart in the world, and their share price is at an all-time high. They must be crying all the way to the bank.

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