Nokia Games Summit 2007: N-Gage: Evolving Mobile Games, Gregg Sauter
Nokia Games Summit 2007: N-Gage: Evolving Mobile Games, Gregg Sauter
He's the Director of 3rd Party Publishing.
N-Gage is about experience: discover, try, purchase, play, share. "What if the community decides what's at the top of the deck?"
"No-one spends 6-700 euros on a device to make phone calls". Nokia aren't comfortable ceding control of the gaming user experience worldwide to EA, Yahoo, etc. They looked at music, but it's an industry in big transition: everyone loves it but it's a brutal business and the commercial side of it is threatened. TV, film, and video will be important; but games are more interesting: it's a huge business (look at market cap of Nintendo/EA). They span every demographic segment.
Gaming is massively untapped: 5% of mobile subscribers play games, less than 2.5% make a repeat purchase.
Sony legitimised console gaming, taking a kids toy and turning it into an adult experience; Nokia want to do the same for mobile gaming. Apple did the same for music with iPod; before then there were multiple devices from multiple manufacturers, different sources for music, different DRM, etc. To legitimise mobile gaming we need to do for gaming what Apple did for music: build a single brand and experience. Even before doing much in gaming, in research Nokia scored very well in brand awareness for mobile gaming.
"N-Gage will be a brand developers can leverage in the same way EA leveraged PlayStation"