N-Gage: Proud or Stupid?

Responding to the idea of a PSP-branded Sony Ericsson phone, the head of Nokia games said at a recent press event:

I’m not scared about anybody. The real question is how do they do it? Can they create a link between the PSP games and a phone? Can they do the multiplayer and online stuff? We’ve been doing this for two years and it hasn’t been easy.

So again, Nokia is showing us why this revival of N-Gage still doesn’t have us feeling more confident than their first go at it.

Nokia is having problems with N-Gage because they are a phone company first (cramming a gaming platform into a device that isn’t natively designed for it) and they have almost no gaming experience except for the original N-Gage devices which were considered failures by the gaming industry.

If they are not scared, it’s because they looking too closely at the engineering challenges, and are thinking that Sony Ericsson would try to do this by themselves.

But any PSP-branded phone would like be a PSP… with, you know, a phone. Sony Computer Entertainment wouldn’t want to fracture game development, and there’s definitely other reasons why they recently launched the ability to download titles from an online PSP Store. Just look to how download-only titles on Xbox Arcade or Playstation Network work on their respective consoles, and you can see how a small-screen PSP phone with no UMD disc could co-exist with a “big screen” handheld PSP console.

Just think of it this way: SCEJ can provide a PSP platform with hooks for telephony, which they may already have begun with the latest Skype support, and Sony Ericsson does the cellular engineering and design around it.

There’s no expectation that this phone be Symbian, Java, BREW, or anything of that ilk, and after seeing Apple’s success in starting fresh, why would Sony want to stick with the old, especially with this brand? After all, this is a company that has made not one, but two mylos!

Nokia, however, is entrenched in S60. They don’t have an SCE, or similar division with 12 years experience, to fall back to when it comes to video gaming. And they continue to think there is a serious audience interested in gamer points and online matches on cellphones when phones have yet to provide any hits bigger than Tetris or Bejeweled — the stuff they’re working so hard to perfect may not actually be what those players want.

Which is why they should be scared, or at least concerned.