大象传媒

Nokia push games as converged media

• Darren Waters
• 19 Feb 08, 22:49 GMT

Nokia have made some of the biggest noises at this year's Games Developer Conference, re-launching its NGage platform and committing to games as one of the key services of the converged world.

, the firms executive vice president for markets, gave one of the keynotes at this year's mobile conference.

In it he challenged game developers to make games that take advantage of the mobile phone - the new graphics capabilities, its location based services, its camera, in essence the phone's place as an always on, always converged device.

Nokia needs to succeed where it failed last time around. The original NGage was a device but now it has been re-born as a service; a platform for games that works on a range of handsets.

The problem for Nokia is that the mobile game market has not taken off as many observers had expected. It may be a $5bn industry but less than 5% of mobile users tend to play games.

Nokia is trying to fix many of the problems inherent in gaming - letting users try out games before they buy them, making it easier to find and download games, and pushing titles that take advantage of the phone as a device.

The challenge is huge, not least because the mobile phone market is so dynamic and subject to pressures and forces beyond Nokia's control, such as data charges, network bandwidth, the carrier's attitude to gaming etc.

It will be interesting to see what happens because if everything goes to Nokia's plans then the Finnish company could well join the big boys of gaming: Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft.