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Offscreen Technologies passes 25 million Ovi Store downloads
Published by Rafe Blandford at 10:48 UTC, April 21st 2010
Offscreen Technologies, who have released a wide portfolio of games, applications and eBooks on Ovi Store, have announced that their content has been downloaded more than 25 million times. Offscreen has focussed on providing content for Nokia's touchscreen devices, including the Nokia 5800, N97, X6 and N900. They currently have around 100 titles in the Ovi Store; some of the applications, including Level Touch, Bright Light Touch and Labyrinth Lite Touch have been downloaded more than a million times each. More below.
The 25 million downloads figure is very impressive and make Offscreen the Ovi Store's most successful publisher by number of downloads. Its products have been downloaded in 210 countries (more than the total number of members of the UN), demonstrating the geographic reach of the Ovi Store.
Electric Beams Touch, Crayons Touch, Backgammon Touch
Offscreen Technologies have been one of the most active Ovi Store publishers, their focus on touch screen applications for Nokia devices (both Symbian and Maemo) has clearly played dividends in terms of download numbers. The majority of Offscreen's games and applications are free, which, together with the quantity, helps explain the high download rate. However, it recently started introducing paid-for applications and games on Ovi Store, including Labyrinth Touch (£3), Disks Touch (£1.50), Backgammon Touch (£3), Timer Pro Touch (£1.50), Video Poker Touch (£3), Crayons Touch (£1.50), Electric Beams Touch (£1.50) and Night Stand Touch (£1.50).
As suc,h the commercial side of the story is less clear (companies are usually reluctant to discuss such details), but it seems reasonable to conclude that a number of business models would be viable off the back of 25 million downloads - pure commercial (based on reputation and cross-sell), freemium (up-sell from Lite version), and ad-supported.
Offscreen Technologies' content portfolio can be divided into three broad areas: games, applications and eBooks. The applications and games follow the usual mould, although they have been developed in a custom IDE (Origo). For their eBooks, Offscreen have developed a standard reader and taken a number of classic works of literature and made them available as standalone applications (e.g. see our review of Alice in Wonderland). The company has also carried out bespoke development (custom apps) for a number of clients.
Labyrinth Touch, Sherlock Homes Diary, Bright Light Touch
From the release:
"The high popularity of Offscreen apps has contributed to the consistent Ovi Store growth and demonstrates that Nokia device owners have a huge appetite for highly visual content they can quickly download and use repeatedly," said Marco Argenti, VP and Global Head of Media, Nokia. "We look forward to many more easy to use and visually appealing apps from Offscreen to continue to fuel the growth of Ovi Store."
"By distributing our apps through Ovi Store by Nokia, Offscreen Technologies is able to further extend the popularity of our titles to Nokia users around the world. We've seen our apps downloaded 25 million times and we look forward to seeing more delighted Ovi Store users enjoying our apps around the world," said Harri Myllynen, CEO, Offscreen Technologies. "In our most popular game, Labyrinth Touch, we wanted to expand the basic concept of a wooden labyrinth on a mobile phone with novel types of levels with different physics: garden levels with stone balls on gravel and caramelle levels with a bouncy rubber ball."
Timer Pro Touch, Level Touch and Angle Meter Touch
Other recent Ovi Store success stories include Nemo Solutions, Digital Chocolate (games), and Shazam. Others who have publicly said they have had more than one million downloads are Polarbit (games), Ravensoft (utilities), MMMOOO (themes), Nimbuzz (IM application) and Nokia themselves (Ovi Maps).
More information on today's news at Offscreen Technologies and Nokia Conversations.
Rafe Blandford, AAS
News Discussion
Yet again the doubters and whiners get one up the arse.
Nokia--;
For what it is worth, for each passing day, the US tech bloggers look more and more like clowns.
The great news is pressure will build up here, and the dam will burst eventually and Ovi Store will be lauded as the one to watch.
Great to see Nokia on a comeback. We can expect to see a similar pattern with the release of Symbian^3 and ^4 - this daft out of date notion that only Apple or Android make phones with good UI's and that Nokia can't compete at the high end, will gradually dissipate and be forgotten like a cloud in a blue sky.
Incidentally looking at the hardware specs of the new iPhone that was lost and found shows they are only just coming up to the spec level (aside from the high res screen) that Nokia users have enjoyed at lower cost and higher quality, for several years.
Now, if only Nokia could fix the app (widget) and finally allow updating applications downloaded form Ovi Store...
Ratza, that's a choise of Offscreen Production. Nokia does not force anyone to sell only through Ovi (of course they may give some special treatment to those that agree/want to do so, but I don't think anyone is forced to an exclusivity deal).
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Originally Posted by Unregistered
Meanwhile the tech media (especially in the US) will continue to convey the impression to their readership that the Apple Store and the Android Store (which makes no money for developers, in general) are the only ones that count. Sigh.
The great news is pressure will build up here, and the dam will burst eventually and Ovi Store will be lauded as the one to watch. Great to see Nokia on a comeback. We can expect to see a similar pattern with the release of Symbian^3 and ^4 - this daft out of date notion that only Apple or Android make phones with good UI's and that Nokia can't compete at the high end, will gradually dissipate and be forgotten like a cloud in a blue sky. Incidentally looking at the hardware specs of the new iPhone that was lost and found shows they are only just coming up to the spec level (aside from the high res screen) that Nokia users have enjoyed at lower cost and higher quality, for several years. |
Nokia can't compete at the high end. What notable profit-generating high end products do they have?
You do know the iPhone 3GS is more powerful than any phone Nokia have, including the N900, right? And quality? From Nokia? Are you ok? The iPhone is solid, while Nokia's devices have been plagued with build quality issues consistently.
Define "more powerful". If having mono speakers, no microSD-slot, 320p res, underclocked GPU by far, no flash at all and a joke camera means powerful, then yeah, I admit, Iphone is the king of the hill, and will be for long. Else, you know what it is ;=
Also, on the Android Market, due to the relative ease of developing apps, there's much more competition (similar to what's happening with the iPhone), which is driving the prices down considerably. On Ovi we can still charge a premium price and achieve reasonable sales as long as it's a quality app. Not to mention that the Android OS is still fairly immature, at least from a developers point of view, in my opinion.
Anyways, there's huge opportunity on Ovi - however it'd be nice if they made it a bit easier (and more fair) to obtain some sort of promotional placement, or exposure (not that any other app store is better at doing this), and gave the developer some method of directly addressing user complaints and reviews.
Josh @ Killer Mobile
As a another fellow developer, I totally agree with your assesment. As a developer of both iPhone, Symbian, J2ME and Android (though still relatively new to us) games, this is also the impression we have.
I also completely agree with your points on what still needs to be improved on the Ovi Store, but as far as we can see Nokia is now serious about developing it further. I am esspecially looking forward to the upcoming Symbian^3 devices, which in my view has huge potential, since these devices will be on-par, and even surpass, most Android and iPhone devices(!)
- Hahaha....a troll with humor....oh wait, my bad :-p
As was said by previous commenters, this big news will just be ignored by the iphone and android pundits, sadly.
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