Kieth Liu - Head of Nokia Games

Interview from Samo - Wednesday, 03 December 2008 @ 1:37pm

Nokia was out in full force at eGames this year with the recently launched version 2 N-Gage platform. Keith Liu, head of Nokia Games & Communities for Southeast Asia Pacific was kind enough to take some time out of his busy schedule to have a chat with AG.

Samo: First thing to start off, Keith, tell be a bit about N-Gage, obviously the second generation N-Gage has not been on the market for very long, how has the reception been so far?

Keith: We launched back in April this year so it’s about 6 months with the platform out in the open, everyone can download trial games or purchase them after they’ve tried it on N-Gage enable devices. I must say that when we first started people had to download the application into their N-Gage compatible or Series 60 device and after that they had to download the games, we launched with 5 or 6 games so the number of games were limited. At this point in time 6 months later the situation is very different, the N-Gage application is now actually pre-loaded in many of our devices like the N95 8GB and the N96 which is now available in Australia, we also have the trial games as well pre-loaded in there so users can try once they open up the box immediately they can try the game. With the N96 it’s even better, the N95 8GB as well because it comes with a voucher that lets you unlock one of the games for free for instance with the N95 8GB there’s a voucher for FIFA 08 so this kind of activity has really made the platform much bigger than it was 6 months ago because a lot more people become aware of it just through the device in that sense. We are very happy to see there are more devices on the way like the N85 and N79 coming on board with the same kind of functionality with N-Gage pre-loaded, N85 and N79 will have 15 trial games pre-loaded with a voucher to unlock any of the trial games. Vodafone will actually be launching a special version of the N85 which includes the Star Wars Force Unleashed mobile N-Gage version with a voucher to unlock that game so that’s something that’s coming online very very nicely so more devices, we have 9 devices being supported now and going into next year and the year after that we’ll definitely see more and more devices coming online. In April we could support basically just N81 today we have N95, N95 8GB, N82, N96 so we’re really happy about how that’s ramped up. On the other side we’ve also got game titles, we have 21 titles now and we’re hoping to launch 3-4 new titles every month so users will see new content all the time.

There's no sidetalkin' here :-(

Samo: The second series of N-Gage is based exclusively on downloadable content then?

Keith: Absolutely, it’s all downloadable content, you can download it over the air or you can side-load it where you download it to a PC and then transfer that to a device. What we find works best is when you open the box and you see the N-Gage icon there and you click on it and with a TV out cable with the N96 or N95 8GB you can play it on the big screen it’s almost like a console experience. We really think there is a lot of value in what this platform provides so when you go into the application itself you can go to the My Games tab and see all the trial games there. Paying for these games is actually becoming easier as well because Australia is one of the markets where we have both credit card payments as well as phone bill payment. When we launched it was limited to one or two operators, today, in fact, yesterday 3 Mobile became the latest operator to get on board to the platform so that means all five major operators in Australia are, you can pay through your phone bill with these five operators now, Telstra, Optus, Voda, Virgin and 3 Mobile so we’re really happy about that because it means the majority of Australians would be able to pay through their phone bill and what we’ve seen is that people do prefer to pay through their phone bill rather than a credit card.

Samo: Interesting. Have you found that after running for 6 months has it been harder getting people to jump onto the new generation N-Gage after the first N-Gage because the first N-Gage, well a lot of people thought it was a good system, I personally owned two, however there is a bit of a stigma; especially with gamers that it wasn’t exactly the greatest thing. Has it been harder to launch the new N-Gage as a result of that?

Keith: Actually not at all, we found that in Asia/Pacific in general N-Gage hasn’t had that much of a stigma. What we found in Australia is that yes, among certain communities of gamers who expected a more robust and long term handheld console platform were probably disappointed with the original N-Gage platform but that’s why we moved it to become a software platform and now what we’ve realised is that people are realising the difference between N-Gage and Java games that they’re typically used to where Java games are much more limited in terms of graphics in terms of gameplay in terms of audio in terms of the overall experience, even the purchasing experience and the discovery experience so once they see N-Gage and the price difference might be $12 or $16 which is maybe double the price of a Java game but the experience is five, ten times more. Creatures of the Deep for instance has got many, many hours of gameplay, up to 50 hours of gameplay so that kind of experience has given a lot of people who were initially skeptical about the N-Gage brand a lot more reason to believe in it.

Nokia has clearly and rightly been inspired by the success of Xbox Live with the new N-Gage app.

Samo: Flowing on from that, how do you see the long term technology progression with the devices where all of a sudden where technology progresses will N-Gage support be dropped off older devices or will there be long term support for users who don’t update their phones often?

Keith: We’ve created N-Gage as a platform that can evolve over time and it should because people change their mobile phone devices much more frequently than they do with a game console or portable games console so in that sense we continue to add more functionality into the Software Development Kit, more different APIs that link to different functionalities of the phone. One example for instance would be we have Dirk Dagger which uses the camera to pan around the screen. We also have Metal Gear Solid which uses the camera to capture colour samples from your environment and that affects your camouflage suit so if you want a green or blue or whatever it is, something yellow, capture that and your camouflage suit becomes yellow so it’s quite interesting. That’s just one example and as we move forward, in our new game Dance Fabulous which we announced a couple of weeks ago, it’s able to tap into your library of music files and take one of them and then you create a dance choreography using the buttons and the music that’s playing from your device so things like that are continually added to the SDK. Other possible options would be an accelerometer, a future game GPS based which utilises the GPS signal to create certain situations in the game itself. Accelerometer, of course you know shaking the device in a certain way we can create different functionalities within the game so as devices have new features we evolve the Software Development Kit so developers can use these new features in their games. Clearly, if they try and play these games on older devices that don’t have these features, then these features won’t work so at the end of the day you still need to rely on your typical directional pad, number keypad as well as the A and B buttons on the N-Gage platform that would still be the key way of controlling it. Touch is one of the elements that as we move along, the platform will start to support all of these different technologies.

Samo: How do you see N-Gage in the marketplace, where you’ve got these two really strong dedicated gaming devices, the DS and PSP, do you see the N-Gage as complimentary to those or do you see them as competition? A lot of people have both a phone and a games console.

Keith: It really depends as well if we look at the number of people who buy mobile phones it clearly surpasses the number of people who buy portable games consoles so for N-Gage what we see is it’s very much like the mp3 player or the portable music player business where you have your standalone portable music player or the N96 which belts out awesome sound quality, has a 3.5mm jack which allows you to use your own headphones, 16GB of memory which allows you to store all your library of tracks. Would you say this is complimentary to mp3? Maybe not but for some people who would want certain functionalities like you for instance you might have functionalities in your iRiver and you prefer using that so I would say in that sense what we bring to the table is a very viable and compelling gaming solution on mobile. We compare ourselves with what people are doing today on their mobile phones playing Java games and we bring a higher quality experience to the table. We’re not here to compete head to head with PSP or Nintendo DS because those devices can’t make phone calls and up until recently couldn’t take photographs but now of course you can with the PSP 3000 or Nintendo DSi but even they themselves are trying to add more hardware functionality so it’s all leading up to a converged road and that’s fine, that’s how technology progresses but for us we’re happy that we can bring a great internet experience for gaming to the mobile platform.

Rex SMASH THINGS!!

Samo: Following on from that is the other big one and the big thing that nobody really expected was the iPhone as a gaming device which is very much an ultimate do everything device much like the N96 as well. How do you see this emerging threat of the iPhone as a gaming device?

Keith: We will always see new technologies and new competitors come to the market all the time and that’s inevitable in this business. What we bring to the table is a consistent platform and a consistent experience across several different devices which target different categories of users who may have $150 to spend on a device or whether you have $600 US dollars to spend on the device, the experience is exactly the same. So if you had $150 and you buy, I’m talking USD now, for instance the 5320 Express Music that’s N-Gage compatible you would still be able to play a game and upload a high score in exactly the same way that a person with an N96 for instance which costs like $1100 Australian Dollars or something, would and the great thing is they would be able to play together so reaching out to a larger number of people with a consistent experience and both being able to earn N-Gage points, both being able to upload a high score and play together through N-Gage Arena, that’s something that we’re really really proud about and one of the reasons why we maintain a pretty strict control in terms of the games that we bring to the market, which consequently means we don’t bring as many I believe you can see many more games or Apps, so called, on competing platforms as you mentioned earlier, is that we want to ensure a very good experience all the time in that sense so I think that you can’t say the same thing for a lot of the Apps or a lot of the games that get released on these competing platforms. A lot of them are free so you can try but a lot of them are also throwaway, you try it, it’s gimmicky, it’s novelty and then that’s it, you’re done with it, it’s a different approach for us, we want to focus more on the gaming experience in that sense.

Daaancin' yeah....

Samo: Back to N-Gage, ’09, what is in store for the platform games wise, is there anything coming up that we should be really excited about?

Keith: One game that we want to talk about is Dance Fabulous, in fact Dave Stewart, formerly from the Eurythmics , we’re working with him actually on this particular game that allows you to control a full body avatar and you can choreograph your avatar to a music of your choice that resides in your device and then you can share this choreography with others through the N-Gage Arena as well so that’s something really cool that we feel will excite people. Yamake is another game that allows you to take elements from your phone whether it’s a photograph or whether it’s words that you like and you create your own mini game and you send that to others to play. So this sort of like, Web 2.0 elements coming into mobile gaming as well where there’s a lot of sharing happening among users of the N-Gage Arena so that’s one of the nice things about an upcoming game. Also, a game that we’re announcing today at 4 o’clock... ...we’re announcing Mega Monsters, which is being developed by Firemint, which is based in Melbourne actually, they’re a great developer, we respect their work a lot, they’ve done a lot of cool mobile stuff, I’m sure you know them and they’re working on Mega Monsters for us, we’re publishing it Nokia Games Publishing is the publisher and we’re expecting it to come out sometime in the first half of next year. Targeted at casual gamers it’s single, one thumb gaming, it’s very fun because you get to control your cute little monster to go around wreaking havoc on cities, 3D environment cities, smashing them , you know, destroying them. You go on a rampage. I’ll bet it will be a good stress buster.

It's all been destroyed, oh the humanity!

Samo: You’ve mentioned a couple of times already the N-Gage Arena, what are the plans for the development of the online community side of things?

Keith: We’ve done a couple of online tournaments that are global and they worked really well in terms of the kind of interest it garners, we think that there are more ways to go into localising some of these online tournaments as well, where people within Australia can compete against each other in a national environment and I think that would garner even more interest and there’s a lot of potential to do that as well so for instance, having games that have this online ranking capability and focusing on specific communities and geographies. So that sort of thing we’re hoping to take further so from a global kind of ranking system we’ll also have a national ranking system. We have a local ranking system here (at eGames) so it’s easy to do a national ranking system as well. We continue to listen to people who sign into the N-Gage forums and give us feedback good and bad and it’s been great and we feel the community has been very instrumental in the way we evolve the service as well. We welcome it as much as possible. We have this feature called N-Gage points right now so every game you play you get to earn N-Gage points and right now it’s for bragging rights but potentially these points could be used for a lot of things.

Samo: So it’s essentially similar to the Xbox GamerScore type system?

Keith: Exactly.

And it was here we got the good old PR wind up. But I thought Keith, while sticking absolutely steadfastly to the company line made some great points about the strength of the second generation platform. I loved his point about strict software quality control, a point only made stronger by my own download of Gameloft’s Guitar Rock Tour for the iPhone which crashes the phone every time I try to play it and that may just be the significant edge N-Gage has over other mobile phone gaming platforms if Apple and co is to continue to allow this kind of crap to be peddled unabated. The other strength I love about N-Gage is the N-Gage Arena, an Xbox live type online service which as Keith mentioned allows for the sharing of game data and bragging rights. Very cool.

It’s hard not to get at least mildly enthusiastic about something after talking to a spokesman for half an hour about it. After all, these people are elite hype-generating machines. However, on extended thought I think Nokia has learned a hard lesson after the relative failure of N-Gage MkI and have got their strategy right for N-Gage MkII, especially with the stronger focus on the casual market rather than the hardcore.