Nokia reduces N-Gage to Ovi only, and opens doors wider to portal partners
In an obscure statement put out by Nokia it has become obvious that it will dump the N-Gage portal after all and fully merge it into its general purpose Ovi portal.
Back at the Barcelona Mobile World Congress in February Nokia said it would add games to Ovi when it merges other services into it in May, but maintain the N-Gage portal because gaming it was such a specialist environment. It now turns out that the economy is an even more specialist environment and this move is dictated by Nokia senior management looking to cut costs.
The merged portal was always scheduled for May and will mean that the Nokia Music Store and Nokia Maps will join all the Ovi Share features and that now this will be the only Nokia portal where you can buy N-Gage games. Nokia says that by year end 300 million phones will have access to the new merged Ovi store.
Nokia made it clear in its statement that its new strategy is to do more partnering and have less internal invention, which is quite a dramatic gesture for it. This is only supposed to apply right now to its new Web Services mission, something that its CEO has campaigned as a hot new area for the past two years.
"The planned changes are aimed at improving and simplifying the user experience of Nokia services, increasing opportunities for third party developers and other partners to create compelling services, and accelerating the development of a common platform for Nokia's different service offerings," said Niklas Savander, Executive Vice President, Services, Nokia.
But Nokia singled out N-Gage for special treatment saying that it would offer games through Ovi but also through other their existing channels, presumably operator portals and retail. "We believe this will create a better experience for Nokia's millions of customers and spur opportunities for game developers," Savander continued.
The game developer move is long overdue. Even the CEO of EA Games has stood up and said that it is far too difficult to get a game past the Nokia quality control function and get it to be part of N-Gage. If games are offered under a third party relationship rather than the umbrella of Nokia, then perhaps Ovi will become more like the Apple App Store and less like Nokia's own services.
Nokia says it will also add a variety of third party partners, such as other image and social networking sites, to the image capture and sharing features on its devices. This is potentially a radical re-thinking of the Ovi plan. Right now there are on-screen options to store on Ovi, built right into its new leading devices at the camera level. If that instead says "Store on Ovi, Kodak or Facebook," it is certainly a weakening of its Ovi strategy and all the hogwash about enhancing the Nokia device experience for those customers who actively use third party services is just covering up a major withdrawal from the portal market.
These moves will release around 450 employees globally from Nokia, which we have taken to mean these are part and parcel of the cuts that Nokia previously announced.
It is no co-incidence that Nokia has announced the Ovi gaming changes this week just as Apple says that it has had 1 billion downloads from the App Store. Despite Nokia's global phone dominance, we are betting this is significantly more than Ovi.
