Notices

Okay, before anyone says "this has been dealt with before", I'm not talking about N-Gage games, I'm talking about the N-Gage Arena online gaming infrastructure.

Just to give a bit of background, N-Gage Arena is the online gaming service used to allow multiplayer interaction on N-Gage titles. The original version of the Arena was actually built by Sega for use with the Dreamcast and other platforms under the name SNAP, Nokia purchased SNAP in 2002 for use with their upcoming N-Gage gaming phone, and Arena is now used with the N-Gage gaming platform for current S60 phones.

Arena was always designed to be used to provide multiplayer gaming for many different kinds of devices, and for a while Nokia was the provider of online gaming for some PS2 games due to legacy commitments as part of the SNAP purchase from Sega.

(Incidentally, SNAP isn't to be confused with SNAP Mobile, a B2B brand used by Nokia in connection with Java games.)

The N-Gage Arena is still being used in a multiplaform way, as it powers both the N-Gage version of Reset Generation and the Windows Java embedded version (which you can play free online at resetgeneration.com). One of the high up people at Nokia's gaming unit told us that Macintosh and Linux versions of the embedded game are on the way. Whether or not that happens, it shows that they COULD happen.

The upcoming Maemo device(s) are going to have quite a lot of graphics potential, more than any current S60 device, and if Maemo gets Ovi Store at some point that would provide a sales channel for commercial games.

Given this situation, is there anything to stop Nokia offering the N-Gage Arena infrastructure for use by Maemo game developers?

I just wanna say that if that ever happened, that would be AWESOME. I love N-Gage on my N95, but on my N810, that would be incredible.

N-Gage is a gaming API on top of Symbian, and only this is complex to port. But N-Gage is also a platform for distributing commercial licensed software including payments. Fremantle doesn't come with anything like this, leave alone previous Maemo versions.

Said that, there should be not many obstacles for developers targeting N-Gage to port their games to Maemo if they have the time and will.

I think we should start thinking of a more open replacement.
I personally think that maybe there should be some cooperation on this front to compete with the likes of apple.
An open gaming alliance for example, which spans across Maemo and android devices.
In a perfect world there would be more devices running Maemo but I don't think that will happen any time soon.
The reason why you need an open gaming alliance is to set some standards for portable gaming, standard hardware specs, standard social features etc.
One of the reasons why the iphone has been successful was because the device itself was sort of a standard.
The developers knew what the lowest spec device was going to be.
So the open gaming alliance would set a spec to guide developers.
Hardware wise the n900 has a shot but having something similar to n-gage arena would help in marketing it as a superior gaming device.
The iphone os currently has lots of games available, trying to compete in terms of scale is probably the wrong approach to take.
But there are issues with the current implementation of n-gage, its a very closed approach.. It doesn't take open source into account.
Having an api open and available to developers has its downsides also, its not as simple as making the current one available as that could enable people to break the social aspects of n-gage.
Maybe to avail of social aspects an open source maintainer must register his project with the open gaming alliance, the oga would distribute the games and the social aspects would only be available from games which were obtained from this repo.
I think the concept of n-gage is a good one but it should not be locked in to any one vendor.
There is also other aspects which could be considered like revenue for open source game developers.
Developing open source games is a very different thing than creating open source applications.
There is a lack of great storey driven open source games. Instead of open source games developers moving onto the next project they improve the current one.
This leads to a lack of diversity in terms of genres.
It also leads to a complete lack of commitment in terms of story telling, instead focusing on the hands on experience and thus ending with dull experiences which are not very compelling.
Its all due to the development model, time=money and unlike application development you are unlikely to get any corporate sponsorship when creating an open source game.
There are many ways this could be changed, having a way to donate directly to the maintainer of a game is a great method.
One of the best methods I have spotted in supporting open source games developers is through a sort of ransom.
The way it works is they show what they have and take donations until they reach their quota at which point they make the source available.
This encourages the developers to start new projects and also concentrate on different aspects of the development process like story telling.
They could also sell a game and when they have sold a set number of copies the code is released, this could encourage closed source games developers to start releasing code.
Maybe the games developers who distribute through the oga and choose the ransom method would receive a small grant to get it finished.

Right, new maemo seems to be a right platform to rival apple and psp in portable gaming market. Does Nokia care about it?

well, if they do...then they have alot of work ahead...really alot

you mean infrastructure (like games shop)?

Perhaps an "open gaming alliance" would have to be open to apple as well.