Ovi Store – the new home for mobile gaming

GLOBAL – As N-Gage begins its transition to the heaven for mobile gaming platforms, a new home is emerging with a whole host of treats lined up. Ovi Store has been sporting an ever increasing range of games since its launch and now that’s set to accelerate further as it picks up the gaming torch from N-Gage. Moving mobile gaming to one central home alongside apps and other content makes complete sense to me and I’m looking forward to seeing what it brings for users.

Ovi Store already packs more games than N-Gage did. 270 for the N97 alone, versus the small collection of titles on N-Gage. Of course, the proposition is slightly different (these games aren’t focussed on the community as much as N-Gage was). As InfoSync world points out, this makes it an ideal place for games to live:

“While the N-Gage service focused on a small number of popular titles, the Ovi Store already offers more than thousand game titles, including the few that have been selected as N-Gage titles to date.”

Beyond the range of games available, there comes a breadth of content which we’d never have seen from the N-Gage store. By virtue of the fact that the Ovi Store is available across so many devices, and across so many countries, distributing games across the different Nokia platforms is much easier than on N-Gage. We’re also ripe for the quick-hit games which might not offer the depth of an N-Gage title, but still help users to lose an hour or two here or there.

We’re busy getting a video interview with the man behind games at Nokia, Mark Ollila who is giving us some insight behind the switch. We’ll have that live for you in the next day or so, meanwhile check out what Mark had to say when he recently spoke to Stuart at MobileEnt.biz.

Let us know what you think about the move in the comments below.