EA proves difficult partner as Nokia ramps up N-Gage

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EA proves difficult partner as Nokia ramps up N-Gage

By CAROLINE GABRIEL

Published: 31 October, 2008

READ MORE: Nokia

Nokia is starting to attract significant consumer and carrier support for its music and mapping services, the initial cornerstones of its Ovi web services portal, which underpins its ambitious internet software strategy. Its next target is to bolster another important area, gaming, and here it may face serious obstacles.

The company initially entered the mobile games market several years ago with the launch of a dedicated gaming device, N-Gage, but that was a failure and last year Nokia decided to relaunch the brand as a software platform and store, with the games able to be downloaded to a range of handsets, notably the multimedia-heavy N95 and N96. This week, it announced support from a key partner, EA Mobile, a unit of EA, one of the world's largest games software houses.

This proved to be a doubled-edged sword though. While EA Mobile said it will expand its support for N-Gage with a dozen new, high profile titles planned over the coming year, it was also very critical of Nokia's process, even voicing its doubts in public at the Finnish giant's N-Gage Summit.

The games on track to appear on the N Series include FIFA 09, Spore Origins and Monopoly Here & Now, all in time for Christmas; with Need For Speed Undercover, Tiger Woods PGA Tour, The Sims and a new Tomb Raider title among the 2009 launches.

But Peter Parmenter, EA's director of worldwide OEMs, managed to tell the N-Gage Summit audience that, in the mobile world, "games are not the new music", and compared the Nokia ecosystem disparagingly with that on the iPhone. The latter has a "great ecosystem for the distribution of great quality games", he said, while N-Gage delivers a "stifled retail experience", with some mistakes in pricing.

Ironically, one of EA's gripes is that Nokia improves its handsets very regularly, running the risk of compatibility problems, while Apple sticks with a single design - highlighting the continuing conflict between the hardware-driven and software-driven models in the mobile market. And Parmenter jabbed further at Nokia, saying it was "easier to get an audience with the Pope than it is to get a game through certification with Nokia".