Amongst other things the document states that:
- "EA, Gameloft, THQ, Sony, Square, Activision, Nokia and other major publishers are in process of developing content for Next Generation Mobile Gaming platform." Assuming they've phrased that sentence correctly, they're talking about Sony as a publisher, not as a licence holder. Square presumably means Japanese publisher Square Enix, which isn't a surprise as Nokia said last year that the two companies were in talks, and Square Enix said simultaneously that they were trying to move into online phone gaming.
- Games on the platform will be sold direct onto the phone as downloads through 3G and wi-fi, or as downloads onto a PC and then transferred to the phone, iPod style. There's also a third option of retail (physical) games, but Nokia has stated elsewhere that they wouldn't use physical distribution any more for their own games, and it seems unlikely that the retail option will ever be used.
- Games can be paid for through the user's phone bill or phone credit, through a debit or credit card, or through vouchers bought with cash similar to the ones used for topping up phone credit.
- As well as 3D there's also support for 2D vector graphics, presumably so that 2D games can run on many different screen resolutions without the need to provide different artwork for each resolution.
- A beta version of the Next Gen platform development kit (0.9.5) was apparently provided to developers in July, with a finished version (1.0) due this December. This fits in with Nokia's announcements since last May that the Next Gen would launch in the first half of 2007, because this is when the first games would be likely to be finished (if one assumes Next Gen games take 6 to 12 months to complete as N-Gage games generally did, and also assumes the beta kit is good enough to do most of the development with).
If the document is correct, the biggest shock would be Sony publishing for the Next Gen platform as they're apparent rivals to Nokia in both gaming, with the PlayStation Portable, and phones, with Sony Ericsson. They'd previously provided certain intellectual properties, Spider-Man 2 on the first generation N-Gage was based on a Sony film, but the phrasing used seems to say that they would be actually publishing games themselves on the Next Gen rather than just providing IP.
Whatever the truth, this raises a related topic about what kind of gamers the Next Gen platform is going after anyway. Nokia aimed the original N-Gage squarely at the console market, but after the failure to make any significant headway in terms of sales they seem to have changed tack and talk about smartphone gaming as something different, something more involved than Java gaming but less hardcore than console gaming.
It's arguable that the commercial failure of the N-Gage and N-Gage QD, standard S60 smartphones with horizontal casings that were marketed entirely as games consoles, showed that smartphone gaming and console gaming are two completely separate sectors. It implied that most smartphone gamers buy something that is obviously a smartphone first and gaming system second, which is exactly the tendency that Nokia is now trying to cater for by spreading the Next Gen platform across a wide range of models instead of sticking to one or two gaming-oriented ones. Some gaming-oriented models that support the Next Gen platform may still appear, but these would probably be niche products aimed at a small number of hardcore phone gamers rather than the more casual bedrock of the platform.