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The first session at GDC Mobile this morning to feature a Nokia presence was called “Publishers Under the Microscope.” It was a panel discussion featuring representatives from several mobile game publishers, including Namco, Vivendi Games, and I-Play. Representing Nokia was Dr. Mark Ollila, director of Technology & Strategy, Games.

Speaking directly to the US-based mobile game developers, the panel offered a gloomy assessment of their prospects, since so many other mobile developers around the world, such as those in Eastern Europe or Asia, were equally competent but offered much lower costs to publishers. The panel did suggest US-based developers could leverage their knowledge of the US market and its tastes to develop games that more directly appealed to the North American market.

 However Dr. Ollila did point out a game developer’s location was less a factor for Nokia’s first party game publishing efforts, due to our desire to push innovation and demonstrate best practices on the N-Gage platform.

The panel then went onto emphasize that sixty to seventy percent of any mobile game’s development budget still has to be dedicated to porting and quality assurance for all the different devices a mobile game has to support.

A ray of light in that equation is the N-Gage platform, as Dr. Ollila pointed out. As you likely know, N-Gage is designed to offer developers a single platform to develop for, which will then work across many different Nokia devices, as each becomes N-Gage certified. This frees up developer resources and allows them to work on more innovative, interesting games.

This was just a general overview of the panel. For more, be sure to check out the conference proceedings which are published after the conference, and for detailed information on creating games for N-Gage, visit http://developer.n-gage.com/.