Nokia Games Summit 2007, Lisbon Had an interesting chat over breakfast with one of the Nokians, talking about N-Gage: I didn't realise they'd shifted it from being a hardware device to being a software platform (which makes more sense to me: it's easier to roll out a slice of bundled software inside all N-Series devices than get a specific device into gamers' hands). This effectively makes one aspect of N-Gage an on-device portal for gaming, which seems to put them back into competition with operators etc. From what I was told this is less of a problem than it once as, and with the likes of O2 outsourcing their games operations to third parties and Vodafone acknowledging the role off-portal content has to play, who knows? Nick Malaperiman, Chairman, Play New, Nokia General introduction, and talks about LocoMash, a geocoding photos app. Promotional video for Ovi: "welcome to the fourth screen". Jaako Kardesoja, Director, Play New Experiences, Nokia Talking about Nokia's restructuring as an Internet company, and their gaming solutions related to this. Devices are becoming properly multipurpose. Ovi is Nokia's approach to internet services; walled gardens aren't working, existing fixed Internet players are moving in as are other new companies like Apple. The Internet isn't so much about searching as participation: YouTube, Flickr, etc. Mobile is becoming the primary interface to the Internet and social networks. S60 device owners weekly usage: use camera (76%), listen to music (64%), plu games (54%), browse internet (48%). 76% of UK pilot participants would use mobile TV, 51% want to use search and mapping apps. Applications which embed with the on-phone UI are more compelling to the user: look at the way XBox 260 integrates shopping and community, or that iPhone embeds Google Maps and YouTube. Advanced services are interesting for Nokia because they advance hardware needs (cf Intel/Windows symbiotic relationship pushing up hardware specs and associated software requirements for PCs), and because they let Nokia make revenue directly from service provision. Mobile device + service + PC: tight integration is needed for ease of use (just as with Apple). Ovi is the Finnish for "door": a combination of existing web services on mobile and new Nokia services. In 2005/6 the number of services crammed into a device was very confusing, and made discovery difficult: "a third level menu item won't cut it". There's also an expectation that customers will learn multiple UIs to interact with multiple services. Shopping is a miserable experience, which is why revenues have been low to date. So, take photography: Ovi rationalises galleries, photography, camera, on-phone storage, Flickr, Lifeblog, streaming into Nokia Photos 1.0. The N81 has a new UI: "a service carousel". This UI is designed for "explorers" (early adopters?) first, but will migrate out to others gradually. The company is being restructured around this - every 2 years they have a major reshuffle, they're quite used to it. They've always been a device company and want to retain this position, but also be seen as a great services company: hence restructure into "Devices" and "Services & Software". So, onto gaming... mobile industry has 3bn subscribers, and about 50% of device owners will buy games (compared to 5% currently buying: so there's massive potential for growth). In particular Asia is showing a lot of growth. Challenges: painful shopping experience, lack of DRM (is this really a problem?), inconsistent game quality, etc. Nokia sell 1m devices per day. 40m N Series devices sold to date. Audience questions: Q: How do you collect money from customers now? A: We're relying on credit cards, operator billing, PayPal - and the efficiency of these for collection. Nokia can't reach as far as providing billing and credit collection. In response to questions about the role of operators, Jaako talks about building a bigger ecosystem for everyone. SNAP: available for other devices? Location

Nokia Games Summit: Forum Nokia, Benjamin Wang Forum Nokia has 3.4m registered members, it's 10 years old. [ lots of stuff about Forum Nokia ] MOSH: MObilise and SHare. An opportunity for developers to share content with other prosumers; a BetaVine-style effort. Encouraging commercial applications to share old versions or trial versions via MOSH. 3m downloads so far, 100k visitors daily. MACS is a mechanism to protect content: Mobile Application Copyright Screening, a mechanism to fingerprint apps and ensure commercial apps aren't shared via MOSH. Content providers can upload a list of applications, the MACS fingerprints them to prevent other users uploading them.

Nokia Games Summit 2007: Nokia Device Strategy, Vesa Jokitulppo A year ago in the UK was the first time that features became the most important purchasing reason for mobile phones. Games are a big part of this. Consumer segmentation: Nokia think they ran the largest-ever study for an electronics company, looking at social demographics, mobile usage, general needs, attitudes to work, play, friends, etc. They plot everyone on 2 axes: involvement (how much they make use of mobile) and attitude (running from rational to aspirational: pragmatism, use of phone as a style accessory, etc). A large number of consumer segments are mapped onto these axes. These axes map to 4 product categories: Explore ("sharing discovery": early adopters, N Series), Live ("inspiring self-expression": phone as an extension to personality, 8800/5000 range), Connect ("progressive simplicity": balancing style with end-user benefits like battery life, etc., 6000 or 3000) and Achieve ("achieving together": serious business devices, E Series). They're not grouped on mobile phone behaviour, which changes over time. e.g. Explore users are keen gamers today, but gaming will move out beyond this category over time. They want product categories to last over time. Why do people within these product categories play games? Explore: competition, community, newness. Live: win for confidence. Connect: mainly through children. Achieve: to relax. Explore have more gaming drivers than the others, and is the #1 opportunity for gaming; Live is the next one Nice chart of how propensity to purchase mobile phone for gaming maps against these product categories and segments. Shows off geographic differences; in India the Achieve segment is almost non-existent and Connect is very small; Live and Explore are both well-represented though. Perhaps because purchases are a higher percentage of income over there, so the phone becomes more of a statement and is a more considered purchase driven by capability and features? Games usage is highest in India, Nigeria, Italy. Series 60 as %age of shipped phones is increasing; Series 40 remains about the same; Series 30 is dropping off. Console games require an appointment to play - mobile games can be played any time. Touch screens will allow a large visible area for a relatively small area - opening up a few innovation ideas. Different consumer segments need different types of games and different levels of immersiveness. Landscape gaming and dedicated gaming keys are what make a big difference to gamers. This is important in the Explore category. Very interesting.

Nokia Games Summit 2007: SNAP Mobile, Markus Huttunen "Nothing new here - I'm going to press F5 on what's going on in the mobile gaming space" What's the promise of connectivity in mobile gaming? People love connectivity in play across all sorts of electronic and real-world gaming. XBox Live is now the key differentiator between XBox and Wii/Playstation, but it took them 4/5 years to get there. Casual gaming: Pogo has 170k players online at once, at night. It gets more eyeball-hours (the new currency of attention) than Desperate Housewives, etc. Connected games get better shelf space, they're bought more, get played longer, and are differentiated from the mass of games out there. Operators get more data revenues from data customers, upsell data to voice customers, showcases fancy data networks, and doesn't hurt to add to the overall offering to customers. Given the move to flat-rate and a lack of supporting data for the last 3 I'm not sure how great this sell is...? ROI for this is unbalanced: technical fragmentation, high testing costs, immature technology vs limited distribution, difficult to deploy globally (nod to operator gateway problems) and no premium for connectivity. Halo got 1m players online in one day. If Nokia ship 1m connected phones/day and they have a connected snake (say) game onto it... how will that scale? Getting this working with such huge numbers is a challenge. The dominant distribution channels in mobile games (operators) aren't taking risk and giving premium placement to connected games. Nokia have purchased and put in place a global infrastructure for serving this stuff.

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"