Nokia has made all its current gen first-party N-Gage games available for purchase via a download service. The games are paid for on Nokia's Software Marketplace website, downloaded to the user's PC, then transferred by the user to a MMC memory card, after which they work exactly as if the games had been bought at retail. This is strictly for the currently available for the original N-Gage and the N-Gage QD. It's not related at all to the Next Gen gaming platform (or any NSeries devices) due to appear in the first half of 2007.
Read on in the full article.
This is clever stuff, it's a shame it wasn't available earlier in the N-Gage's life cycle.
Rafe wrote:This is clever stuff, it's a shame it wasn't available earlier in the N-Gage's life cycle.
I think this was their intention all along, hence the original N-Gage's lack of an external card slot and the stripped-down nature of the launch games (for example Pandemonium had almost all its sound files removed for its N-Gage port). Stripped-down games would have been easier to fit on the 128 megabyte MMCs that were common at the time, and with downloads the external slot issue wouldn't have mattered at all and the MMC card would have been well protected.
Indeed, if you look at the manual of the original N-Gage it says something very vague about how to buy games for it, something along the lines of "some games are available on cards or as downloads" as if they hadn't yet made up their mind which format to go with.
But when the download idea was discussed in interviews in 2003, Nokia implied that they were pressured by third party game makers into distributing on physical cards. The third party publishers seem to have been worried that a downloads-only format would be more vulnerable to piracy.
Would have been even cooler to make the games available on all S60's..
Well Jukka, it's funny you should say that because... 😉
Yes, but why not make it legit. N-Gages are not among the most sold of S60 devices..
Jukka, they ARE making it legit, the Next Gen N-gage service will let you buy N-gage games (both next generation and current gen ones) onto any S60 3rd edition device. We just have to wait until 2007 for it to start.