Nokia's marketing team have a lot on their plate with the upcoming Next Generation Mobile Gaming Platform. Can the name 'N-Gage' be overcome? Ewan takes a look at the mountain ahead...

There’s an interesting post over on the S60 blogs by Nokia’s US Marketing Manager of the S60 Software Platform. He talks about the marketing data that Nokia collects and collates every month, and putting that into the perspective of matching user needs, from the basic Nokia 1100 to the N800 Internet tablets. But right after that, he mentions the successes and failures along the way, via links to Wikipedia.

The success? Nokia’s multimedia [kitchen] matchbox sized N95. And the failure? The N-Gage. And while I think failure is a rather harsh word to use, the most important thing is that Nokia have acknowledged, in some form, that the N-Gage was clearly not a success. And this is going to be the biggest benefit from the original game deck.

Nokia’s launch of The Next Generation of Mobile Gaming is expected in the near future, and it’s going to be a big moment for Nokia and the PR team. Because I can guarantee that everyone in the games media is going to label it “N-Gage 2” and I’m sure that means the jokes, the sniggers and a general NIMBY attitude are going to leak out.

Total sales of the N-Gage family were in the order of 2 to 3 million. Consider that the Sony PSP, with estimated worldwide sales of 30 million devices, is still regarded by many as a misfire from the electronics giant – and that’s from an established player in the market, with a proven track record and a multi million dollar ad-spend to help smooth over issues (not that I’m suggesting anything…) Compared to that, what chance do Nokia have of a fair hearing?

So for Nokia to blow us away with any Next-Gen platform, it’s going to have to be doing everything better, faster and stronger. And Nokia need to do more to get their message over to the media, the internet and the general public.

Of course I don’t expect this to be the launch of just a single device (although I still expect a games orientated Nseries device – have you tried a long Snake session on the N95 compared to on the QD?). There’s going to be talk of the platform, of N-Gage capabilities residing in other phones, thus turning devices like the N95 into a ‘gaming phone’ by default. We’ll see some top tier game developers announced; Electronic Arts, Sega, Gameloft, THQ and Codemasters have all previously written titles for Nokia, so I’d expect those relationships to continue in some form. There’ll be games galore, with both connected aspects and innovative game play - I suspect titles like Project White Rock will be pre-announced, potentially at the Games Developer Conference in Leipzig where Nokia are keynoting.

Nokia are not relying on a single gaming device this time around – the operative word is platform. There is already a general seeding of this idea in the trade press, with favourable write-ups to the strategy; this from Mobile Biz : 

[Nokia] demonstrated how the company has learned lessons from the demise of its dedicated handheld device — focusing on community aspects that can sit around the games across a whole range of handsets… Showcasing a raft of functions which should seem familiar to anybody who uses Microsoft’s Xbox Live platform, he explained how Nokia aims to transform the user experience into “smooth, efficient, easy steps”. This, Howard said, could revolutionise the way that phone users perceive the device as a games platform.”

Part of the change is the morphing of the N-Gage Arena into a full scale social network of players – which will also allow for the online purchase of games, and downloading of those titles and the demos. All things that have been piloted previously, with a very large user base, that seems to have gone un-noticed.

Make no mistake, the promotion of the new platform is going to be a tough mountain for Nokia to conquer, but I think that the simple act of acknowledging the N-Gage as a ‘failure’ in whatever form, pouring over the three years plus of marketing data on the Classic and the QD, the experience of fighting in that arena, against the ‘big boys’ could be as useful a failure as the Avro Manchester Bomber.

You’ve probably never heard of the Manchester. It was a twin engined Word War Two bomber, noted for a lack of power, unreliable engines, short range and limited payload. It was tweaked slightly, the mistakes were sorted, and the new bomber rolled out. The Lancaster.

Will the Next Gen Gaming Platform have wings? Time will tell, but Nokia have the perfect foundation to take off from.

-- Ewan Spence, 27 July 2007