Nokia N-Gage relaunched: From hardware to service

Perhaps one of the most surprising and enlightening announcements today from the Go Play event was the rebranding of the Nokia N-Gage from a hardware product to a service. The once hardware-centric brand is now a software and service that will be available throughout the Nokia phone platform. What this means is that anyone will be able to experience gaming across the board on all Nokia phones via download from the PC or over the air (OTA) direct download to almost any Nokia phone.

I remember when the first N-Gage was announced. Though it was not released in the Philippines, I wanted to get a piece of the action because I thought that mobile gaming was the coolest thing. As it turns out, many months later, I was able to test the next generation gaming phone called the N-Gage QD which was sadly swallowed by other dedicated gaming platforms in the form of the Sony Playstation Portable and the Nintendo DS.

I remember writing in a magazine column on why the old N-Gage business model was not sustainable – it had something to do with the Nokia guys not having computer gaming as one of their core competencies (as compared to Microsoft, Sony or Nintendo). With the games only openly available for the N-Gage and the N-Gage QD, this made access to casual games even more unaccessible as you would have to purchase the hardware AND the software to play games.

Nokia has now revamped the N-Gage into a gaming experience service that consists of (1) over the air downloads of all N-Gage titles via Ovi as well as (2) access to the wireless N-Gage gaming community also via the same portal. Game downloads will cost between 6 to 10 Euros. The games can be downloaded from the N-Gage website (you are actually downloading a software platform first for older models) which will be available come November 2007. The service will be fully available in South East Asia come first quarter of 2008.

Currently, these phones are compatible with the N-Gage service:

Nokia N73
Nokia N81
Nokia N81 8GB
Nokia N93
Nokia N93i
Nokia N95
Nokia N95 8GB

So what do you think? Will the newly repackaged N-Gage service fly? How much are you willing to pay for a game? Take a look at the picture above. That’s a Nokia N95 8GB utilizing the new Tv out feature to play games over a big television screen.