Nokia appears to be getting ready to throttle back on its N-Gage gaming platform after some of its newest top end devices appear not to have the processing power to support native N-Gage gaming.
News broke this week that N-Gage will not appear on the N73, N93 or N93i smartphones, despite previous promises, adding to speculation that the entire gaming effort may soon be put on the back burner.
The decision not to offer N-Gage on the N73, currently rated the world’s bestselling smartphone, also highlights how much power and performance are now needed from a handset to support the kind of gaming experience users want. Nokia said it was “not satisfied with the N-Gage experience and N-Gage gaming on these devices’, which has disappointed N73 users, and shows that standard smartphones do not have the oomph to live up to the expectations of gamers.
Phones are expected to make the dedicated mobile gaming product redundant and vendors will have to couple their games software with their most heavy hitting superphones ‘ so if N-Gage is to survive at all, its main handset this year will be the N97. Other new-model smartphones from Nokia also support N-Gage, notably those with the Symbian S60 Feature Pack 1 version 3.1. These are the N85, N79 and N96, plus the upcoming N97.
But there are serious doubts over how long N-Gage will survive at all, after a chequered history ‘ it was originally launched as a device brand, offering mobile consoles combined with cellphones and bundled with games. This saw limited take-up and N-Gage was reborn as a software platform to run across a range of Nokia smartphones.
Last month Nokia said it would continue to offer a separate portal for N-Gage rather than throw it all into the Ovi super portal which has absorbed all of its other web services. It said N-Gage as a service platform would be retained specifically for very high end gaming requirements ‘ hence the shift from mainstream phones, on which Nokia will hope to push games via Ovi and its partners, to the high end only.
The N73 has sold over 20 million units since launch, but appears to be considered inadequate, by its supplier, for the high end of the mobile multimedia experience, and Nokia will be hoping to push power consumers to upgrade to the beefier N models.