MoCo News is carrying a number of reports from the Games Developer Confernece in San Francisco, including this keynote from Gameloft's CEO Michael Guillemot. With news that there was no Christmas spike in mobile game sales, he compared the current market to that of the end of life of a console - which should promise an upturn in 2008 as new hardware, techniques and greater public visibility will help drive awareness and (hopefully) sales.
Read on in the full article.
The greatest of respect to Gameloft, but it's hard to see how phone games could possibly follow the console sales model at all.
New phone hardware comes out all the time, there isn't a single month without several new phone launches. Nokia alone brings out new phone models at the rate of two or three a month. How can people be waiting for new models, when new models are constantly appearing left, right and centre?
TBH it sounds more like Gameloft trying to soothe nervous investors.
By the time n-gage starts, I am probably already on my next smartphone....
That's the beauty of N-gage though, it isn't tied to any hardware. Nokia is going to put it on all of its smartphones, so you can buy a new one without giving up the platform.
If N-Gage succeeds I'm sure we'll see a lot more platforms like it from other companies, not just for games but for serious apps as well.
New console? Try any of the recently announced Nokia handsets or the existing N95/N82 etc, plugged into a TV. That's the only console most people are going to need.
Yup, I was looking forward to gaming on my N95, but by the time N-Gage is out and really catched on, I'll be on a N96 (probably). Better yet, the current "gaming" keys of the N95 are awful.