30 October 2009

R.I.P. Ngage: 2003 - 2010

In a not so shocking twist of fate, Nokia has planned the removal of one of the services from its Ovi umbrella, officially ending the Ngage gaming community and service initiative by 2010 with an ever so subtle whimper. Via an understated post on the official Ngage blog, the Ngage community's are was let out of its balloon. The heartbreak was summed up with this statement:

"...the Ovi Store will be the new central place for all the mobile games that Nokia and other publishers offer from this point forward. We will no longer publish new games for the N-Gage platform."

In a conversation with correspondents at Mobile-Ent.biz, Mark Ollila, Nokia's new director of X-Media Solutions, Media & Games, reiterates the new strategy, stating, “Simplicity is important. Rather than having multiple channels for purchasing games, we’re converging to having the Ovi Store as the place to find and buy games. We’ve already got more than 1,000 games available on there, from over 150 developers and publishers."

"We are not releasing any more games on N-Gage, although the store - the ability to buy N-Gage games - will remain open until at least September 2010, and the N-Gage service will run through to the end of 2010," he says. "The message is that Ovi Store is the place to find and purchase mobile games. It's our one-stop shop for games."

This comes as a bit of a shock to some consumers, seeing the recent accelerated release of new Ngage titles as a positive sign of life for the platform. In retrospect, the massive amounts of new Ngage titles were just a dumping of the publishers' Ngage projects into the marketplace after finding out the service and platform would soon be shuddered. All unreleased titles will either be mothballed or released as standalone applications through the Ovi Store. Previous Ngage titles should be ported as standalone games as well, though how long that takes to get completed hasn't been announced, and developers aren't yet making announcements.

While its saddening for the Ngage faithful, its a positive sign that Nokia is wasting little time acknowledging its mistakes with Ngage and moving forward to correct them. It will allow Nokia to continue focusing on refining the Ovi brand, shifting the gaming retail experience to the Ovi Store, which has proven successful for Apple's App Store and its as yet unmatched gaming retail experience. The Ngage platform isolated and segmented itself from the Ovi Store, locking it out of the benefits it would provide on a wider scale. This painful move will mostly be to correct that, and unify the software acquisition process for the consumer.

What started as a couple of dedicated Symbian powered gaming devices and started the entire Sidetalking revolution and Ngage Arena gaming community has evolved, but not died. Ngage as a brand may be a lame duck, but gaming on the Symbian/Ovi landscape is far from an issue of mourning.

Symbian's Screenplay technology will mean more devices with 3D accelerator hardware installed across the device portfolio to take advantage of the UI rendering features. This will translate over to the gaming aspect of development, with developers more likely willing to implement that same hardware to deliver more richly detailed graphics.

"It's very important to emphasize that Nokia is much committed to mobile gaming overall," says Ollila. "On Ovi Store, games is the number two paid premium category behind apps, and the number two for overall downloads."

Ngage Arena is dying along with its namesake platform, but not social gaming. Symbian is still robust enough to allow developers to implement their own social elements into their games. Ovi will begin working on implementing some social elements into the Ovi service umbrella, but the implementation into specific games is totally up to the developer. They can opt to have no social support, add the Ovi solution as it becomes available, implement that of another already existing social networking service, or creating one of their own.

So today I'd like to honor the Ngage gaming initiative as revolutionary, trailblazing, and possibly well before its time. May its spirit live on in the Ovi Store from 2010 to time indefinite. Goodbye Ngage. Sorry to see you go, but progress is progress. It was high time to move on.