Nokia Targets N-gage Platform To PC

Nokia Targets N-gage Platform To PC

By James Quintana Pearce - Mon 02 Jul 2007 10:46 PM PST

Nokia is expanding its N-gage gaming platform to include PCs and is developing a game—Project White Rock—as a demonstration game. “While we currently have few details regarding gameplay, we do know that ‘Project White Rock’ possesses over a thousand lines of recorded dialogue. Don’t be fooled into thinking it’s a role-playing game, though, as our sources indicate otherwise. We’re also told the game’s resolution will remain the same on PC as on mobile; in short, Nokia wants you to have the same experience on both platforms” reports Pocket Gamer. Nokia develops games to show off the capabilities of its platform and give games developers an idea of what is possible, so this should be viewed as a way to encourage multi-platform games that work on both mobiles and PCs.

It’s a natural extension of Nokia’s gaming efforts, which started with a game-specific device several years ago before morphing to a mobile gaming platform for the S60 platform. Extending that to other platforms increases the market, and therefore the attractiveness of the platform. As for the number of devices, the number of mobile devices being used is expected to hit 3 billion soon, and if Nokia manages to get a 40 percent marketshare that would put the number of Nokia devices in the market roughly on par with the number of PCs. Of course, most of these will be low-end devices that aren’t relevant to the N-gage platform, but if Nokia keeps the marketshare as the current high-end devices become middle and then low-end devices the number of N-gage capable phones will increase. Since the details of the game aren’t available it’s unclear how far this goes—playing mobile games on PCs, and against PC players, is a good step forward but there are plenty of innovative ways the two platforms can be joined… Although that may be for game companies to take up.