Ever looked at the competition for the N-Gage to see what they're up to? I don't mean the upcoming behemoths of the Playstation Portable and the recently arrived Gameboy Dual Screen. I'm taking about the fight between the second string machines to be 'the best of the rest' and join Sony and Nintendo. The Gizmodo (a Windows CE gaming machine) and the Tapwave Zodiac (Palm OS) are both from much smaller companies, looking to become big players in mobile gaming.
What interests me is the availability of the SD Card based games for the Tapwave Zodiac. You can buy the physical cards when you find them, but every Tapwave game can be purchased and dowloaded over the internet, through Tapwave's online store. Most of their users have access to a good internet connection and are happy to download megabyte sized files and copy them onto their SD cards (or the relativly massive 128mb of internal memory on the Zodiac devices). So if a small start-up company can work out that (a) games are the key to a games machines and (b) we can't get a strong enough retail presence to sell to all our Zodiac owners, then Nokia must have thought this as well? Why aren't they doing anything?
Actually, that's a bit too black and white. Nokia have already made the first step in acknowledging that over the air downloads actually work. There are online 'limited level' demos of "Asphalt: Urban GT" and "Pathway to Glory," and the Finns are planning to get a copy of the 3D extravaganza that is Snakes on every N-Gage in the world by electronic means. If this works, then harness this for the good of the platform, the users and everyone who has invested in the N-Gage system.
The 'Pathway to Glory' demo was 15mb, and required a desktop computer to install it onto a blank MMC card. The big corporate hurdle of 'can we do this succesfully?' has already been overcome through the demos and the forthcoming Snakes application. One small step remains. How to make money from it. The biggest costs in MMC Games is the actual MMC card, the packaging, and the share of the money that has to go to the distributor and the retail store. Long ago the shareware authors realised that if they went direct to the customer, they could make more money, even though they were charging the end user a lot less than the full shop price.
I'm sure Nokia and Handango could sit down and work out a system where the games can be purchased and downloaded online. Once the game is on the N-Gage (or realistically, on a nice big MMC card), you could log into your N-Gage Arena account from inside the game and have the copy 'authorised' to yourself.
Which games should we start with in the system? How about the back catalogue? Titles like the original Splinter Cell, Rayman, Pandemonium and FIFA2004 are perfect candidates for this system. If the price on these titles was around 10 Euros, then the coding time for a small authorisation patch is going to paid in a relativly short time, and suddenly there's huge range of games available for new users, a new revenue stream for Nokia and the software houses, and the old titles don't die out. And with a low cost purchase route, a lot of people may want to make their warez copy ‘legit’ through a purchase.
Lets not forget all these games are already out there in the dark corners of the Internet if you look for them - for some titles it's the only place to get them. At the moment it's a lot easier to find most of the older titles online than in the shops. Nokia should be making it even easier to get a legitimate copy of these games than hunting through the illicit corners of the Internet. These games still have value, as witnessed by a new Tony Hawk Pro Skater Arena competition being started up.
If the retail chains push Sony and Nintendo to the detriment of the N-Gage, then having a proven channel to get the latest and greatest games onto the devices is going to keep the platform alive and well, and able to go 'underground' well into the future if needed. I can't see what's stopping Nokia going down this road in addition to the bricks and mortar approach they're currently using. Every piece is in place, Management just need to join the dots together.