Nokia´s mobile gaming service available at last

With two cancelled launches due to software testing delays in its recent past, the Finnish cellphone giant Nokia was under the microscope this week as it announced that this time its launch of a new mobile gaming service was definitely going forward.

The company advised its many N-Gage gaming service supporters that the official launch is scheduled for Monday April 7 and will go ahead, energising a lethargic mobile game market.

“There will be an official announcement on Monday, but for you, the N-Gage faithful, we wanted to let you know we’re up and running!” Nokia said in its N-Gage blog.

MSNBC reported that the innovative gaming service is one of the cornerstones of Nokia’s new Internet services strategy. Nokia, which made 40 percent of all cell phones sold globally in the last quarter of 2007, is the first handset maker to make a major push into the content sector.

Nokia has opened the service to users of its top model N95 and four other multimedia phones — the N81, N81 8GB, N82, and N95 8GB. It has sold 10-15 million of these phones in total so far, according to analysts.

The mobile gaming market suffered an unexpected slump last year, MSNBC reports, with many game developers and analysts pointing to telecom operators’ lack of investment in marketing.

All major cell phone games publishers, including Electronic Arts, Gameloft and Glu Mobile, have signed up for the Nokia platform.

Nokia said last month some 25-30 games titles would be available for N-Gage by mid-2008 and a similar number of titles would be unveiled during the second half of the year.

Research firm Informa has said the mobile gaming market was roughly flat in 2007, but it expects revenues from mobile games to reach $7.2 billion in 2012 from $3.2 billion in 2007.