Tzer2 goes all provocative in a piece on our sister site, OviGaming.com, asking what on earth Nokia are up to with their games strategy. On the one hand, with parts of the ecosystem stalling and people leaving, on the other with new initiatives, URLs and game titles. It does seem a mystery, so get involved with the discussion.
Read on in the full article.
I have not see any impressive games on N-Gage for a while...
In fact maybe 1 out of every 5 games release on N-Gage is decent to play with. The latest good game being Dance Fabulous...
Steve, what do you see in the future of gaming on N900? Do you think N-Gage HD will be on Maemo?
News are spreading that iphone apps can be easily ported to the N900, maybe you will need to start a Maemo Gaming blogs down the road.
Just by looking how the Linux community works in general, I dont expect there to be a huge gaming scene on the N900 unless it hits some sort of wide consumer base. The N900 will mainly be bought by tech fans.
Although the N900 has the power i doubt many people in the open source community will dedicate time to make games. Even if you look at the current Maemo scene, there arent that many games, let alone in 3d.(3d, for that matter, since there were no 3d drivers provided for previous versions. Maemo 5 will be the first time they allow 3d accelleration even though the nokia N810/800 ran on the Omap 2 architecture with OpenGl graphics like the N95/E90/N82)
Looking at emulators there are hardly any at all and those that do work only run at around 40% (if you're interested in that stuff, and only if you play games you own).
Unless there's some huge backing with the N900 i doubt it will get anywhere with games. If Ngage were to come to the N900 i would doubt that'd be the N900's holy grail as Ngage is mostly Java ports. On the flip side, since you're pretty much programming using the OpenGL ES 2.0 standard and at the same time you're releasing a free OGLES 2.0 Iphone app, it shouldnt be that difficult to port over.
Another thing, there's no real central distributor for paid applications (OVI is coming, but that in itself is horrible, nothing compared to the service provided by the Apple Store. Ovi does not allow re-downloads, no sort of confirmation/registration code given by the app provider, etc.) that will handle such a thing properly