Nokia n-gage part three
Rating: it all about the community
by Bena Roberts
The new n-gage has arrived and I had it in my hands yesterday as I received a demo from Nokia’ head of mobile game sales but it’s not a pure device but instead a mobile on-device client.
What we think?
This isn’t Pocket Gamer and I am not Stuart Dredge so please don’t expect a technical review here. From the aspect of a female techie non-gamer the on device client was interesting. During the analyst event, Nokia failed to promote the recommendation, discovery, personalisation and community aspects of the new n-gage and focused on the gaming costs and specifics.
But when I had it in my hands I realised the future potential and vision in creating an ODP that can evolve and grow with the audience. What was clearly missing however was a search box or discovery tool (see following articles on Nokia Mobile Search).
The real benefits of the n-gage could be organic because of the community blogging and recommending community that sits on the client. But again, at EUR 10 or GBP 8 a game its very expensive. You can rent games on the n-gage but Bouygues has a free mobile games portal and also 3 allows users to rent games for next to nothing.
I think price will be a put off for the casual gamer. Also what was amazingly missing from Nokia was any talk of advertising or ad-funded gaming?
This was a huge surprise and in today’s advertising economy it something that can’t be avoided.
During last nights dinner with Nokia I received an RSS alert on my mobile from GigaOM saying “Is third time lucky for the n-gage?” I didn’t have time to read the whole story but I did steal the question and I put it to Nokia gaming executives and they both looked at me in the eye and said, “YES!”
