Ilkka Raiskinen on N-Gage, and more

Nokia's games supremo tells all

Learning Experience

Nokia has been learning lessons right from the moment that N-Gage took its first public bow - even if it hasn't always showed it in public. N-Gage QD, a device which answers most of the key criticisms about its predecessor, has been in planning since well before the launch of the original N-Gage, Raiskinen tells us. "We started to get feedback after the initial launch [in February 2003], and after the launch we discussed which features we should incorporate in the first version and which in the second version," he explains.

"We started to develop QD before 7 October [the global launch date of the N-Gage] - it was a pretty tight schedule and that's something we want to continue to have, if need be," he adds, referring to the company's intention to continue adding new N-Gage decks to the product line-up as it perceives a market desire for them.

Although Raiskinen is honest about the fact that the company made mistakes with the N-Gage, he's adamant that plenty of things went right, as well - and he says that Nokia never even considered dropping the N-Gage brand and starting fresh with the QD. "No, not at all," he responds when asked about the possibility "We have been getting critique on various features of N-Gage. Of course we have been conducting some studies there, and we want to prove that N-Gage means mobile online gaming, and the content and the games are the key, not the device."

"We didn't consider [changing the brand] at all, and we believe that the N-Gage brand has a good appeal, especially amongst younger people and maybe casual gamers," he continues. "I think the feedback very often has come from the hardcore gamers who have compared the game experience on N-Gage to the game experience on the consoles, and of course they have been right in criticising N-Gage from that perspective."

Hardware vs. Business

The idea that games are the key to the N-Gage's future success, not hardware, is one that Raiskinen returns to time and again - and it's a theme which will be familiar to many industry watchers, since it echoes the one constantly visited by that other recent entrant to the platform holders enclosure, Microsoft. Indeed, he freely admits that the N-Gage platform has been designed from the outset with the need to be a strong business model within Nokia's operations at the forefront, rather than any other concern.

"We need to use the economies of scale that we have," he explains. "The whole strategy is about being able to use those components which we have anyway, and test whether we can create a good enough games platform. Creating an optimal games device is easy - big screen, lots of horsepower, big battery - but making money and creating a business case that's viable, that's the tricky part. And now we are betting, or you might want to say gambling, on the fact that we can build on our mobile phone heritage in this space.

"Whether it succeeds or not, we will know in a couple of years time, but surely the strategy from our perspective is simple - we use the things that we have in-house, and try to see if they work. Once again, big screen, big battery, big processor - putting that in a device, that's fairly simple."