Archive for February, 2007

During next month’s Game Developer’s Conference, we’ll be recording a podcast with some of the top people involved in delivering the next generation of the N-Gage experience.

Currently slated to appear in this broadcast are:

• Jaakko Kaidesoja — the head of Nokia’s next generation mobile gaming efforts
• Gregg Sauter — the head of N-Gage’s third party publishing program
• Mark Ollila — director of Technology and Strategy and head of Nokia Games Publishing

As a special treat for our Future Watch readers, we’re giving you a chance to submit questions that we can ask during the podcast.

So if you have a question, please leave it in the form of a comment attached to this post. And while we can’t promise to answer every question, we’ll do our best to consolidate and cover as many questions as possible during the show.

Thanks for your questions and stay tuned to Future Watch for your next generation N-Gage news.

Wow, AllAboutSymbian has just put up a really interesting article which gives their perspective on the challenges and opportunities for the next generation of N-Gage. The article lays out some past successes (N-Gage Arena, first party games, and the marketing of Pocket Kingdom), some problems, and how they think we are mitigating some of those problems. Apart from being an excellent and objective article, it also provides a pretty good overview of how the next generation of N-Gage gaming is going to work, i.e. it’s going to work across different Nseries devices and other Nokia S60 devices.

The one thing they were highly critical of in the article was the continuing use of the N-Gage brand name, which they gave some pretty well thought out reasons for. I’m not sure it’s quite as black and white as they laid it out in the article, I think perceptions change with experience and if we can provide a great experience what the brand means will change.

BTW the guy behind the success of Pocket Kingdom, Scott Foe will be speaking at GDC, check him out if you get the chance. I’ll be there as well but not speaking, but I might be blogging about stuff going on there.

If you’re familiar with our Future Watch site, you probably already know EA Mobile and Gameloft have committed to support the next generation of N-Gage.

We expect EA Mobile and Gameloft to bring a number of top-selling, award winning titles to our platform for launch. They aren’t the only ones, as throughout the year we will continue to make exciting announcements of other leading publishers adding their titles to our games catalogue.

By early 2008, we expect to have some of the biggest franchises and hottest mobile games included in the N-Gage experience.

Sorry about this post going up and down but we had a bit of internal confusion - we’ll make this work so stick with us!

Stay tuned, the best is yet to come!

Lots of buzz about the next generation of N-Gage over the last couple of days, with Pocket Gamer reporting on a ’secret meeting’ reportedly hosted by Nokia and demonstrating the new platform to other game publishers and developers.

Following up on that, Mobile Entertainment spoke to Jaakko Kaidesoja, head of our games effort, about the future of N-Gage. He told the magazine to look forward to the Game Developer’s Conference for more news:

“One of the main events for us is GDC in San Francisco in early March and that’s really where you can expect some announcements,” he said. He also addressed the ongoing speculation about whether or not there will be a new dedicated N-Gage gaming device:

“We’re working on gaming ergonomics across our range, but there are no plans for new a N-Gage device at the moment,” he says. “For sure it’s a hot topic and everyone wants to know about it, but first and foremost we want to bring the new platform to market and make sure it works across a range of devices.”

This is consistent with what we’ve said on Future Watch all along, in the FAQ from the Next Generation section of this site:

“As we have not yet announced the full range of N-Gage compatible devices, we cannot specifically address the question of a dedicated gaming device. However all of our N-Gage ready mobiles will be capable of playing next generation N-Gage games.”

Now it’s your turn to play speculator… What kind of announcements do you expect from us at GDC?