Blog > Archive for the ‘Industry’ Category

It’s just been announced that Nokia’s Anssi Vanjoki will give a keynote address at this year’s GDC Mobile. The title of his talk will be: “Play with anybody everywhere — context, the new paradigm for game play.”

Some details on the talk from the GDC program guide:

Vanjoki will present Nokia’s move into context aware services and the impact that mobile devices are having on entertainment around the world and the role that N-Gage will play in evolving mobile games experiences and the industry.

GDC Mobile is a track within the Game Developer’s Conference focused on mobile gaming and entertainment. This year’s GDC Mobile takes place on February 18-19, 2008 at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco, Calif. during GDC 2008.

For more on GDC Mobile, check out the official site.

We know all of you are eager to get started with N-Gage First Access, and we are just as eager to get it into your hands and start hearing your feedback. We have teams of people around the world, literally, working overtime to deliver this experience to you.

Unfortunately, as can sometimes happen in software development, unexpected difficulties can occur. We have been doing an internal run with more than 1,000 global testers this week, and during this process we uncovered an issue we feel we need to address. Overall, the games and service are working smoothly, but because of this issue, we feel we could not release N-Gage First Access before the holidays as planned.

As we work on a solution, we will continue to polish the overall experience, ready more games for N-Gage First Access, carry on our extensive internal testing over the holidays, and prepare for the new year and the new wave of mobile play.

Pocket Gamer has put up a beefy interview with Dr. Mark Ollila, head of first-party publishing for N-Gage as well as director of technology and strategy. In this wide-ranging discussion, they talk about everything from global positioning, Nokia’s music initiatives, Project White Rock and cross-platform gaming, and more.

Here’s a snip:

“What’s important, though, is we don’t want to necessarily have the technology driving the actual gameplay. We’re very focused on creating good games, so gameplay is very important, obviously. But what we’re looking at is how technology can add to that gameplay, and give an experience that players will enjoy.”

Definitely worth a read.

All About N-Gage has put up a profile-slash-interview of Nokia’s Scott Foe. It goes into his past accomplishments in the N-Gage program and then drops a few hints about Project White Rock.

White Rock is the as-yet-unrevealed next generation N-Gage game that was first mentioned at March’s GDC show and was also written up by Pocket Gamer (here).

A snippet from the piece:

Interviewing Scott Foe is comparable to reading a riveting novel where the final chapter has been taken out. As the producer behind the Project White Rock, the N-Gage title clouded in mystery, all he would tell me about the title is the aforementioned aliens, shotguns and rocket launchers comments. Make of that what you will.”

Also be sure to drop by the new Project White Rock forum.

All About Symbian’s new sister site, All About N-Gage, has put up a new article called “So, how is Next Gen N-Gage doing after the Go Play revelations?”

The article analyzes our recent next generation N-Gage announcements and makes a number of interesting and candid points regarding the games catalog, the hardware lineup, the controversy around retaining the N-Gage name, and the potential reach of N-Gage gaming in the months and years to come.

It was definitely written by someone who gets it.

A few snippets:

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….”

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.”

The only thing I would say that is incorrect is that Dogz is not a Nintendogs clone; the first game in the Dogz franchise was released for the PC waaaay back in 1995.

Go read the whole thing!

Wow, I’ve never seen so many articles about N-Gage as I have in the last few days. So let’s keep this short and sweet, here

are a whole bunch of links to write-ups of the new announcements so you can get an idea of what the press thinks.

Here’s what the gamer press had to say:
Gamasutra
IGN
Gamespot
Pocket Gamer
Next Generation
Computer and Videogames
Kotaku

And the technology folks…
Wired
Gizmodo
Mobile Industry
Trusted Reviews (with a great line, Finntastic!)
The Register

And the mainstream media got into the act too:
USA Today
CNN
Washington Post

Also, Pocket Gamer sat down with Jaakko Kaidesoja at the launch event. Definitely a must read interview, discussing

hardware acceleration, Tetris, FIFA, pricing, launch dates, and even Project White Rock.

And finally, a great blog post by Ricky Cadden on Symbianguru.com called “Why I think the new N-Gage will be successful.”

I’m sure there are many more links out there, feel free to add them to the comments.

For those of you in Asia interested in mobile game development, you’ll be glad to hear that Nokia will be the primary sponsor of the Games Convention Asia 2007, Game Daily reports.

The convention, being held in Singapore between September 6th through 9th, will be the first convention in Singapore catering the entire Asia-Pacific region for the interactive entertainment, infotainment, edutainment, hardware and technology industry.

Representing Nokia will be a keynote by Jawahar Kanjilal in addition to special sessions with Miikka Skaffari and Keith Liu.

For more on the conference, visit the GCA official site.

Hello N-Gage fans, Ikona here with a quick news round-up of N-Gage and Nokia-related articles.

First off, All About Symbian has a fascinating article about using the TV out on your Nokia N95 device for gaming. This is a really enjoyable writeup with great pictures of Snakes, the System Rush demo, and some other games running on a big screen.

Next up, Tech Digest has some rumors about a Nokia event to be held in London on August 29. They speculate about the launch of a music service, the Nokia N81, and even talk about the N-Gage. More speculation on the same event is featured on Tech.co.uk, which reports on a viral video apparently circulating around the Internet, promoting the N81 too.

Finally, Investor’s Business Daily has a write-up on the growth of the mobile gaming industry. There is a paragraph or two on the N-Gage (even a picture of an old school N-Gage QD!) but not much new here for N-Gage fans.

And the line about “an updated model of the N-Gage is scheduled to launch this fall” is not entirely correct — as you guys should know by now, the new N-Gage platform will launch on a range of Nokia mobile devices.

For those of you looking forward to or at least interested in the Develop game conference being held in Brighton, Nokia has released details of the three sessions it will be hosting at the show.

The Next Generation of Mobile Gaming?
Martin O’Driscoll, business manager (games)
Tuesday July 24th

The N-Gage User Experience
Scott Howard, N-Gage Arena game product manager
Wednesday July 25th

Developing for the N-Gage Platform
Miikka Skaffari, Online SDK product manager
Thursday July 26th

The Develop conference takes place from July 24th-26th at the Metropole Hotel in Brighton. Among the keynote speakers this year are Chris Satchell of Microsoft and Richard Garriott of NCsoft.

More about Develop can be found here.

Hello sports fans, Ikona here. I’m back from vacation and ready to roll with some more N-Gage news. So let’s catch up on the latest good stuff…

 
Pocket Gamer on Project White Rock

Last week, Pocket Gamer got the scoop on ‘Project White Rock’, the as-yet-unannounced N-Gage game which they report is being developed by RedLynx (of Pathway to Glory fame) and which also (according to this article) will have a playable PC component to the game.

We first talked about Project White Rock in this post from the GDC show earlier this year.

 
Mark Ollila in Mobile Industry

Our own Dr. Mark Ollila talks to Mobile Industry.biz at this year’s Nordic Game conference in this two part interview. In the first section, he discusses the challenges of the mobile gaming industry. In the second piece, he discusses mobile versus PC and console gaming.

Part I | Part II

And there’s even more with Mark here, as Digital Media Wire asks him five questions about mobile gaming. Here’s a quote:

The other thing that we’re pushing toward with the N-Gage experience is that it’s a software platform across multiple devices such as our N-series devices.”

Nokia’s Fast Track Development

Finally we have news from the development side: Nokia has rolled out a program called Launchpad, which gives mobile game developers access to SDKs and other software tools available to Form Nokia PRO members, but at a much lower price.

While not N-Gage-related, that should be of interest to any of you out there interested in developing Symbian games.
As always, if you find more stories, drop a link in the comment section. And P.S. to Sunnycricket — we’re not at E3 this year, at least as far as I know.

– Ikona out