Nokia Sees Overall Gaming Market “Not Growing”; EA Slams N-Gage

As the global economic crisis continues, Nokia’s head of gaming Jaakko Kaidesoja said he expected that the overall gaming market is “likely not growing” in 2009. Speaking to Reuters at Nokia’s gaming summit in Rome, Kaidesoja said, however, that some parts of the market–including pre-loaded games, emerging markets, N-Gage (naturally), and iPhone–would grow. Kaidesoja also revealed that players had created 400,000 personal profiles on the N-Gage Arena since its launch in May. There are now more than 20 million N-Gage capable handsets on the market, but the major stumbling block, which Kaidesoja acknowledged, was that for the vast majority of those phones, users must install N-Gage on their phone themselves. Kaidesoja said pre-installing the N-Gage to handsets and having a local billing system in place, rather than credit card payments, would help boost the takeup of the service. He also revealed that 80 percent of all N-Gage subscribers use their operator billing system. Nokia (NYSE: NOK) did not disclose how many consumers had bought N-Gage games. The world’s largest handset maker plans to roll out touch screen support for the gaming service next year.

Meanwhile, N-Gage partner Electronic Arts (NSDQ: ERTS) was brutally frank that Nokia still had a lot of work to do to make the gaming service better, with EA Mobile’s Peter Parmenter calling the handset maker’s efforts so far a “soft launch,” reports Pocketgamer.biz from the event. Some other choice quotes from Parmenter:

One a one stop game shop: “The one build multiple handsets dream that we thought N-Gage was going to be is maybe not quite polished yet.”

On margins: “As a publisher, we will make twice the revenue from selling an iPhone game in Italy than we will from selling an N-Gage game at the same price. We need to work together on the economics.”

On MOSH: “I won’t tell you how many EA Mobile games have been downloaded from this site, it’s a very large number. It’s not a system we want to promote.”

On getting games on N-Gage: : “I think it’s easier to get an audience with the Pope than it is to get a game through certification at Nokia.”

Still, EA announced today that it would launch EA Sports FIFA 09, Spore Origins and Monopoly Here & Now for N-Gage in time for Christmas sales, and would roll out Need For Speed Undercover, Tiger Woods PGA Tour and The Sims 3 in the new year (release).

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