N-Gage (service)
Digital video game distribution platform for Nokia devices
N-Gage, also referred to as N-Gage 2.0, was a mobile gaming digital distribution platform from Nokia that was available for several Nokia smartphones running on S60 (Symbian). The successor to the original N-Gage gaming device and launched as part of their Ovi initiative in 2007, it aimed to offer AAA games for trial and purchase into a single application with full compatibility to all devices, along with online multiplayer and social features using N-Gage Arena via in-house servers. Games on the platform were natively coded or ported using C++. Testing began in Finland in February 2007, but the service faced numerous delays before the service finally rolled out on April 3, 2008 with five launch titles, initially for Nokia N81, N82 and N95 owners.
Less than two years after its full launch, on October 30, 2009, Nokia announced that no new N-Gage games would be produced. A total of 49 games were released for it. Nokia moved its games onto their Ovi Store thereafter. N-Gage games can still be played on compatible devices, but support for the online features ceased in September 2010.
Development
Nokia's N-Gage gaming smartphone from 2003 did not perform as well as expected, and its upgraded QD version did not make any significant impact on the N-Gage's reputation. During E3 2005, Nokia announced that they would rebrand the N-Gage platform as a gaming service on several smartphone devices, rather than releasing a specific device.
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This entry incorporates text from “N-Gage (service)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.