05 Nowember 2008

Peter Parmenter and Chris Gibbs
Very Negative About N-Gage Platform

Stuart Dredge from pocket Gamer has posted quite an interesting transcription from the recent Nokia gaming summit in Rome.

It’s actually a session with EA Mobile's Peter Parmenter and Chris Gibbs, that are talking about the general state of the mobile gaming industry at the moment and it seems that they are not impressed with the Nokia's N-Gage concept.

They are comparing the N-gage platform with an iPhone and mostly express irritating complaints about the lack of the support for the high-quality hardware accelerated 3D graphic, extremely annoying problems with games certification, problematic cross-phone stability that creates headaches for coders, very bad revenue share and finally problematic SDK that lacks support for the accelerometers and graphics hardware!

To be honest with you I know nothing about the SDK or revenue but I do agree with them about the certification and the graphic especially. Few months back I said that high-quality graphic is needed to compete with the other platforms out there and predicted that it will be impossible to compete with such bad weak graphic system and unfortunately now it is obviously that I have right!

Of course, game consists of many more elements, elements like controls, music, story etc, but I still think that good graphics can sometimes be the only thing a person looks for in a game, and actually in lot of situations it is a major influence on their purchase! So in short we need more games like Global Race and more phones like Nokia N95 or N82 equipped with great Texas’s OMAP 2420 (GPU is based on the PowerVR MBX 2D/3D graphics accelerator from Imagination Technology) chipset!

Now, how game-friendly is Nokia's strategy? It seems that they have exactly the same arguments as we here at Symbian Freak. "Think about the Tube, really large screen but no hardware acceleration, so it's not the most game-friendly device in the world. Nokia has to look at the idea of games having full support from the handset strategy that Nokia has overall."

"If a guy's sitting in a bar with a Nokia N96, and their friend has an iPhone, if the guy with the N96 downloads a game from their operator portal, they'll get a Java experience. Their friend will get a hardware-accelerated iPhone experience. That can't be right." says Parmenter.

He says EA sees N-Gage as a soft launch so far. The publisher is announcing that Spore Origins, FIFA 09, Monopoly, Tiger Woods, Need For Speed, Boom Blox, The Sims 3 and Tomb Raider Underworld. Oh, and Pandaemonium - the latter two are Eidos titles.

He mentions iPhone again. "Yes, they've created a great ecosystem for the distribution of high-quality games. There's a lot of free games, and we don't know if the market will be able to sustain that. Time will tell. However, from a customer experience perspective, everyone's in agreement that they've created something very special, and it's shaken things up."

EA believes that mobile games is "stifled by a poor retail experience". So what does N-Gage do? "The one build multiple handsets dream that we thought N-Gage was going to be is maybe not quite polished yet." Lumme.

However, he's also complimentary - EA loves the try-before-you-buy aspects. "We need to understand what makes a good demo. Maybe we're giving customers too much, or not enough. We need to address that."

Parmenter is also keen on Nokia's billing solution for N-Gage, and the DRM.

Margins. "As a publisher, we will make twice the revenue from selling an iPhone game in Italy than we will from selling an N-Gage game at the same price. We need to work together on the economics."

Cor. It's certainly not a soft-coated 'we love Nokia' presentation. And there's more: MOSH. "I won't tell you how many EA Mobile games have been downloaded from this site, it's a very large number. It's not a system we want to promote."

And more: "I think it's easier to get an audience with the Pope than it is to get a game through certification at Nokia."