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All About N-Gage: The Next Generation

6 replies · 1,737 views · Started 28 August 2007

All About Symbian's sister site All About N-Gage is back! Head on over there right now to see the revamped site, which is ready to inform you about all the developments with the Next Generation of N-Gage games on S60 3rd Edition smartphones.Rafe has been hard at work redoing AAN from the ground up, and it now has a brand new look, a new Next Gen games database and is generally 125% more spiffy than the old gen site.To start the ball rolling, the first major article on AAN is a list of questions and answers about the new N-Gage platform: The AAN Next Gen N-Gage FAQ.

Read on in the full article.

Just to say it wasn't just me, there were others helping out too. Thanks to everyone who had input into this!

I wouldn't be at all surprised if S-E do a Playstation-branded phone. However, I suspect they'll wait to see how the Next Gen N-Gage does first. If Next Gen N-Gage takes off, SE will have all the justification they need to create a rival.

If it runs on Symbian UIQ3 (which seems extremely likely, SE smartphones usually do) then it might turn out to be relatively easy to develop the same game for both an SE gaming phone and the Next Gen N-Gage platform as they'd be running the same version of Symbian (albeit with a different interface on top). This would benefit both platforms as it would make them much more attractive to third party developers.

I don't know if it would be wise to have a single Playstation model though. One of the hard lessons Nokia learned from the original N-Gage is that most people don't really want a totally gaming oriented phone, it's just not a high enough priority on their list of features, even for people who do use phone games.

The kind of people who spend hundreds on a phone tend to change their phones quite often, and want their phone to have the latest features with the latest looks, so it might be better to have a Playstation-branded gaming platform instead of a Playstation-branded phone.

If this happens, it would be a shot in the arm for UIQ3 gaming and Symbian gaming in general. A Playstation platform on SE phones and the Next Gen N-Gage platform on Nokia phones could make Symbian the main portable gaming OS, indeed the main gaming OS in general.

I think you pretty much said all krisse...great analysis!!!

But if a SE gaming platform does appear, i guess they will use the PS Network infrastructure, and not a new one...it makes sense that way...soon the psp will be able to download games directly from there, so i see it happening for SE phones in the future

hi,
does anybody know what nokia are going to do about copyright protection with the new ngage games? Especialy if they are available for download. The last ngage games were availabe very quickly on illegal mobile download websites and i remember playing the games on my n70 when the original ngage got discontinued but as i have a n95 its happy days when the new games come out 😊

"But if a SE gaming platform does appear, i guess they will use the PS Network infrastructure, and not a new one...it makes sense that way...soon the psp will be able to download games directly from there, so i see it happening for SE phones in the future"

The "Playstation phone" probably wouldn't use PSP games because it would be based on a totally different OS, with a totally different screen resolution and orientation and totally different controls. The Playstation element would (I suspect) be restricted to the branding rather than the actual technology.

The network could be the same, but the network doesn't make that much difference to the hardware. The N-Gage's SNAP network was designed for the Sega Dreamcast, and has been used to provide online for PlayStation 2 games, but it still works fine with phones too.

"does anybody know what nokia are going to do about copyright protection with the new ngage games? Especialy if they are available for download. The last ngage games were availabe very quickly on illegal mobile download websites"

That's the point though, releasing games on physical formats didn't protect them from piracy at all, they STILL got pirated. It doesn't really make any difference if they use a download format instead.

There is NO protection against piracy on any format, all of Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo's consoles have been successfully cracked very quickly, even the most recent ones. The best strategy against piracy is to make legal purchases much easier than piracy, which is what will apparently happen on the Next Gen N-Gage. The legal games will be downloads, but unlike pirated games the downloading will be completely automatic, the user doesn't have to fiddle about with file managers or anything.

If you can buy a game legally direct to your phone over the phone network, for a reasonable price, with just a click of a button, then even people who know how to pirate games will be tempted to make an impulse purchase if they're waiting for a bus or whatever. And of course most people don't know how to pirate games, so they're even more likely to buy the game.

When Nokia gave away Snakes for the N-Gage, a lot of people posted on boards saying they didn't know how to get it from the Nokia website onto their memory card. Piracy demands a certain technical skill which most gamers don't have.

If the Next Gen N-Gage (or any other games platform) can make it as easy to buy a game as it is to send a text message, then piracy won't really matter that much. We've already seen this with the success of the Nintendo Wii's virtual console, whose NES and SNES games have been freely available on many many pirate sites for many years now. Yet people are buying the legal versions in large numbers, partly because most people don't know about emulators, partly because most people wouldn't know how to use an emulator even if they had one, and partly because it's just so convenient to get the game straight onto the console at a low price.

An even better example is Java gaming: java games are very very widely pirated, yet java games sell well because they're so darn easy to buy. Java piracy doesn't really matter because most people find it easier to buy the games legally.